Every Secret Thing

Monday, April 6
1.

“Interesting,” the ophthalmologist said, rolling away from Cynthia Barnes in his wheeled chair, like a water bug skittering for cover when the lights went on in the middle of the night.

“Not exactly my favorite word in a doctor’s office.” Cynthia tried to sound lighthearted. The metal apparatus was cold and heavy on her face, and although it wasn’t literally attached, she couldn’t help feeling as if she were in a vise. Each flick of the doctor’s wrist-Better here? Or here? Here? Or here?-seemed to tighten the machine’s grip on her.

“Good interesting,” he said, rolling back to her. “Now, is it clearer with the first one or”-he flipped something, inserted something, she had never been sure what he was doing-“or this one.”

“Could I see those again?” She sounded tentative, even to her ears, which shamed her. Cynthia still remembered what she was like back when she was always sure about things.

“Absolutely. This one”-the letter O, bold but a little wavy around the edges, as if it were underwater-“or this one.” This O was not quite as bright, yet it was clearer.

“The second one?”

“There are no right answers here, Cynthia. An eye exam isn’t a test.” He chuckled at his own wit.

“The second one.”

“Good. Now is it better with this one or”-another flip-“this one.”

“The first one. Definitely the first one.”

“Good.”

She felt a little glow of pride, then embarrassment for caring at all. She had arrived at the doctor’s office on a wave of apologies, having skipped her annual exam for the last three years, despite the friendly little postcards that arrived every spring. She was AWOL from the dentist, too. And she might have passed on this eye exam, if it weren’t for her younger sister’s sly observation that Cynthia was squinting more often these days. “You keep straining like that, you’re going to have one of those little dents,” said Sylvia, who had never forgiven Cynthia for getting the one pair of green eyes in their generation. “Better reading glasses than Botox.”

Cynthia had almost snapped: Get off my damn back, I’ve earned that dent. Instead she had made this appointment with Dr. Silverstein, who had moved to the northern suburbs since she saw him last.

Satisfied, Dr. Silverstein swung the machine off her face, returned her contact lenses to her, along with a tissue to catch the saline tears that flowed from the corners of her eyes. He was younger than she, it dawned on her. He must have just been starting out when she first went to him thirteen years ago. She wondered how those years had treated him, if his life had gone according to his expectations and plans.

“Well, I’ve seen this before,” Dr. Silverstein said, smiling so broadly that his dimples showed, “but I’ve seen few cases as pronounced as this.”

Cynthia was not comforted by the smile. She had known too many people whose expressions had nothing to do with what they were about to say.

“What? What?” I’m going blind, I have a tumor behind one of my eyes, which explains the headaches. But she hadn’t told Dr. Silverstein about the headaches. Should she?

“Your eyes are getting better, Cynthia. We see this sometimes in people who have worn contact lenses for a long time. Nearsightedness improves. You’ve been having trouble focusing on things because your contacts are old and pocked by protein deposits, not because you need a new prescription.”

“What about reading glasses?”

“Not yet.”

“Good. I’ve heard that if you get reading glasses, your close-up vision gets worse and worse.”

“Ah, yes, that old wives’ tale. It doesn’t quite work that way.” Dr. Silverstein picked up a model of the human eye, which Cynthia found disgusting. She hated to visualize what lay beneath the fragile veneer of skin, always had. She was nauseated at the sight of flattened squirrels and cats in her neighborhood, and a passing glimpse of one of those surgery shows on cable could send her into a near faint.

“There’s a muscle that controls the lens of your eye, if you will. It gets rigid with age…” His voice trailed off when he realized Cynthia was staring over his shoulder, refusing to make eye contact with him or his plastic model. “Anyway, no reading glasses yet, just a new contact lens prescription. These should be ready in a week. Should the nurse call you at home or at work?”

“Home. I haven’t worked in years.”

Dr. Silverstein blinked, suddenly awkward. He was one of the people who had never had a chance to say, “I’m sorry,” because the tragedy was almost a year in the past by the time he saw her at her annual exam. Cynthia’s life was full of such acquaintances, well-meaning types who had been left stranded by the tenuousness of their connection. Doctors, mechanics, accountants. She remembered the April immediately following, when Warren asked the accountant how one calculated for a dependent who had not survived the calendar year. Did they take the full credit, or did Olivia’s death mean they had to prorate the deduction? For Warren and Cynthia, who had already asked a thousand questions they had never planned to ask-questions about burials and caskets and plots and the scars left by autopsies-it was just another dreary postscript. The accountant had looked so stricken she had wanted to comfort him.

She was beyond that now.

Cynthia went blinking out into the bright day, remembering, as she always did upon leaving the eye doctor, that first pair of glasses when she was ten. The wonder of finally seeing the world in sharp, clear focus had been dwarfed by the fear of her classmates’ taunts. The other girls at Dickey Hill Elementary, even her friends, were always looking for a way to prick the self-importance of Judge Poole’s oldest daughter. Another girl might have begged her mother to let her carry her glasses in a case, putting them on only as necessary. But to take them on and off would be an admission of weakness. So Cynthia wore those tortoiseshell frames wherever she went, holding her head high.

“Four-eyes,” one girl had tried. “Four is better than two,” Cynthia had said. And that was that.

She climbed into her car, the BMW X- 25, a sports utility vehicle chosen not for its status but its heft. At 4,665 pounds it was heavier than the Lexus, even heavier than the Mercedes, and easier to maneuver than the Lincoln Navigator, which was a bit ghetto, anyway. Cynthia had actually wanted something a little less glamorous, because high-end SUVs were big with local carjackers. But the BMW had the best safety rating, so she bought the BMW and withstood the usual teasing about her love of luxury. Yes, she had once cared about things like expensive shoes and fine jewelry, had deserved her family’s fond observation that Cynthia believed herself to be, if not at the center of the universe, just a few inches to the left. But that Cynthia was long gone, even if no one else could bear to acknowledge this fact.

Her cell phone rang. Headsets weren’t the law in Maryland, but Cynthia had opted for one anyway. It amazed her to think of how she had once driven one-handed through the city behind the wheel of a smaller, sportier BMW, heedless of her heedlessness.

“Cynthia?”

“Yes?” She recognized the voice, but she would be damned if she would grant this caller any intimacy.

“It’s Sharon Kerpelman.”

Cynthia didn’t say anything, just concentrated on passing the cars that were entering the Beltway from the tricky exit off I-83. The Beacon-Light had recently run a list of the most dangerous highway intersections in the city, and this spot was in the top five. Cynthia had memorized them without realizing it.

“From the public defender’s office?”

“Right,” Cynthia said.

“I guess this is a courtesy call.”

As if Sharon Kerpelman were even on speaking terms with courtesy.

“I guess,” Cynthia said, “that if you don’t know what it is, I don’t either.”

“Yes. Well. How have you been?” Sharon asked, as if reading from a script. Maybe she had finally gotten a copy of Dale Carnegie, which she sorely needed. But Sharon, being Sharon, would go straight past the part about winning friends and skip ahead to trying to influence people.

“Why, just fine,” Cynthia drawled. Not that Sharon would ever notice anything as subtle as a tone. “But I’m driving and I don’t like to talk on the Beltway unless it’s urgent. So-”

“This is-well, not urgent, but important.”

“Yes?” Spit it out, Sharon.

“Alice Manning is coming home Thursday.”

“For a visit?”

“For…ever. She’s being released.”

“How can that be?”

“She’s eighteen now. After all, it will be seven years in July-”

“I think I remember,” Cynthia said, “when it happened.”

The headset was suddenly tight on her temples, squeezing so hard she felt as if those soon-to-be-rigid muscles behind her eyes might fly out of her head. How unfair. How unfair. The juvenile lament was her instinctive retort whenever this subject came up. Her father, who usually snapped at such idiocy, who had devoted his professional and personal life to establishing Solomon-like standards of fairness, had agreed with her. “Yes, it is,” he said on that not-long-enough-ago day when the deal had been struck. “We have bent the law as far as we can, but we can’t go further without breaking it. They are children in the eyes of the law.”

“And in the eyes of God?” she had asked her father.

“I suppose they are children still. For God has to shoulder responsibility for all of us, even the monsters among us.”

Today, her rage found its outlet in childlike cruelty. “Was Alice the fat one or the crazy one?” She could never forget their names, or their faces, yet she always had trouble matching them up. It was a kind of selective dyslexia, like her tendency to confuse surnames such as Thomas and Thompson, Murray and Murphy. Cynthia thought of the two as grotesque Siamese twins, connected at the waist, tripping over their four legs as they came down her street, up her porch, into her life.

Sharon ’s voice was prim, intended to be a reproof, as if Cynthia could ever be shamed on this topic. “ Alice was the one with blond hair, worn straight back with a band. Here’s a tip: think Alice in Wonderland.”

“What?”

“As a mnemonic device, I mean. Or Ronnie-Aran, if you prefer, as in Isle of Aran, for she had dark hair and light eyes. The look they sometimes call Black Irish.” An embarrassed laugh. “I mean, I don’t call it Black Irish, but you hear that sometimes, among people of a certain generation-I mean-”

“I know what you mean.” Sharon had said so much worse to Cynthia, so blithely and unknowingly, that it was hilarious she would fret over this minor gaffe. The last time they had spoken, in a chance meeting outside a shopping mall, Cynthia had yearned to box her ears. But Judge Poole’s daughters didn’t fight with their fists.

“Anyway, I just wanted you to know. So if you saw her. Alice, I mean.”

Everything made sense now. Her eyesight was getting better because she needed to see. Come to think of it, her hearing was sharper, too, so intense that the softest sound jarred her from her dreamless sleep. She didn’t exercise, it seemed idiotic now, going around and around on a treadmill or a stair-stepper, yet she had never been stronger, leaner, had more stamina. Maybe she should write a book, The Black Coffee and Cigarette Diet: How to Mourn Your Way to a Better Body. Good line, she would save that one up, throw it out to her sister, Sylvia, the next time they talked. Sylvia was the one person in Cynthia’s life who didn’t flinch at her sarcasm.

The significance of Sharon ’s call finally worked its way into the center of her brain. “She…is…coming…home. To my neighborhood.”

“Technically, I don’t think the Mannings live in Hunting Ridge. They’re a few blocks outside the boundary.”

Technically. How Sharon loved technicalities, legal and otherwise.

“She is coming home,” Cynthia repeated. “To a house that is no more than six blocks from my house.”

“Helen Manning’s a city schoolteacher and a single mother. She doesn’t have the resources to pick up and move.” How quickly Sharon always switched from contrite to self-righteous. The defensive public defender, Warren had called her. You must understand, Cynthia…What purpose can be achieved, Cynthia…They are little girls, Cynthia…Your tragedy, great as it is, Cynthia…There will always be some ambiguity, Cynthia. You, of all people, must value justice, Cynthia. Cynthia, Cynthia, Cynthia.

As if what Cynthia wanted was anything less than justice. She had let them talk her out of justice.

“Can’t you make it a rule that she has to live someplace else?”

“Of course not.” Sharon ’s voice was huffy now, hurt. It was the paradoxical mark of the offensive, in Cynthia’s experience, that they were offended so easily. The only feelings Sharon safeguarded were her own.

“When that man on North Avenue got pardoned, they made it a condition that he couldn’t go back to the neighborhood where he had shot that child.”

“It’s not the same.”

“No, he killed a thirteen-year-old boy. This was a nine-month-old child. Oh, and he was pardoned.” Cynthia did not add: He was a black man who killed a black child. These were white girls who killed a black baby. She let her silence say that part, let what was unsaid make Sharon squirm, in her little cubbyhole in that sad-ass state office building. All your scheming, all your planning, and you sit today where you sat seven years ago. What was the point?

“You live in two different worlds,” Sharon said. “You’ll probably never see either one of them again.”

“We lived in two different worlds seven years ago, too.”

“You know, I’ve always felt that the only way to understand what happened was to think of it as a natural disaster, almost like a tornado, or lightning.” Sharon ’s voice was so reasonable, so sure of itself, the voice of a girl who had been on her high school debate team and still considered this a notable achievement. “A series of events came together and formed something horrible, something destructive. Wouldn’t it make you feel better to see it in that light?”

Answers crowded Cynthia’s tongue, backed up into her throat, until she thought she might choke on them. It would make you feel better. You always try to have it both ways, and you won’t even let me have it one way.

Brake lights flashed ahead of her, traffic coming to a stop for no discernible reason, and her reflexes were off because of the phone call, so the 4,665 pounds of BMW squealed and shimmied, coming within inches of the rusty little Escort in front of her, a ready-to-disintegrate heap with a Kings Dominion bumper sticker and a Confederate flag decal. Cynthia didn’t mind Confederate flags. She’d like to see a law that required every white trash hillbilly to have one tattooed on his or her forehead. You would see them coming that way.

“Can I have a restraining order?”

“I don’t think Alice is inclined-”

“I didn’t ask what anyone wanted to do. I asked what I could have. What the law will give me.”

Sharon sighed, put-upon. “The courts can’t write you a blank check for things that haven’t happened yet. But I can tell you that Alice will be counseled to stay away from Ronnie Fuller and your family.”

“My family? You mean she knows? You told her? Why would you tell her anything about me?” Cynthia’s voice rose, in spite of herself, frantic and out of control, and she realized someone in the adjacent lane was staring at her.

“I haven’t told her anything. I meant family in the most general way possible.”

Family in the most general way possible. Only a single woman, a childless woman, could speak of family in the most general way possible. Cynthia hung up on Sharon Kerpelman, as she had so many times before.

It took her forty-five minutes to crawl around the Beltway. That meant the end of Dr. Silverstein, Cynthia was afraid. No doctor was worth that kind of time. Between the drive and the wait in his office, she had been gone four hours, which was much too long. She parked behind the house and let herself into the back door, where she was welcomed by the security system’s polite beep.

“Hey, Momma.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Cynthia’s eyes could keep improving for ten, twenty years, and they would never be as sharp as her mother’s. Paulette Poole could see the future with her green eyes. Paulette Poole had predicted trouble when Cynthia and Warren bought this house. “Why do you want to live over there? Who are you trying to impress?” And Paulette Poole had seen from the first how the justice system, which had given the Poole family so much, would fail them when they needed it most. Paulette Poole was a witch, in the best sense of the word.

“Just traffic, Momma. Rush hour starts earlier and earlier in this city.”

“Well, you go all the way to Towson to get your eyes checked…” Paulette Poole didn’t bother to finish her sentence. Her daughter knew where she stood. Paulette Poole thought it was ridiculous for Cynthia to quit Dr. Hepple, their neighbor in Forest Park, in order to go to some white Jewish doctor just because his office was convenient to her job at City Hall.

“Where is-”

“Upstairs. With a video.”

Because her mother was there, Cynthia walked with deliberate slowness, taking the front stairs instead of the back. She heard a tinny sound from the street, the plink-plink tones of an ice cream truck, although the ditty faded so quickly that she wondered if she had imagined it. All around the carpenter’s bench / The monkey chased the weasel / The monkey thought it was a joke. She remembered a smile, a horrible, inappropriate smile, and the way her hand had ached to jump out, smack it from the child’s face.

The alcove off the master bedroom was intended to be a dressing room, but Cynthia had renovated it three years ago, insisting it was large enough. Now that it had made the transition from nursery to bedroom, it clearly wasn’t. Still, she resisted Warren ’s gentle nudging on the matter, pretending she didn’t understand why he wanted their bedroom just for them again.

Rosalind sat on the floor, eyes locked on Sleeping Beauty, singing along in a breathy baby voice. La-la-la. La-la-la. She was such an easy baby, had been from the first, and had passed through the so-called terrible twos with barely a tantrum. She had never known colic, which had troubled Olivia so, and she was seldom stricken with so much as a cold. Well, a child breast-fed until the age of two had advantages when it came to immunities.

Rosalind had also come out shockingly light and stayed that way, a trick of the blood that Cynthia’s mother claimed for her family tree, although Cynthia knew there wasn’t a fair-skinned ancestor in the bunch. No one knew what to make of the amazing hair, which hung in amber ringlets. Her eyes, however, were brown, like almost everyone else in the Poole and Barnes clans. Olivia had gotten the green eyes of this generation, and family legend held that only one child would have green eyes.

“Who dat baby?” Rosalind had asked a few weeks ago, noticing for the first time the photograph in a small oval frame on Cynthia’s dressing table. “Who dat?”

Who dat indeed? She and Warren had known they would have to tell Rosalind one day. But it had never occurred to them that a toddler would initiate the conversation with such a basic existential question: Who dat? She was your sister. Except-she wasn’t, because you and she never existed in the same plane. She is nothing to you, and never will be. And if she had not died, you might not exist, because your mother had specific plans for her life, and having a baby at age forty-one was not one of them.

Rosalind was satisfied with the simplest truth: “Olivia.” She repeated the name, patted the photo, and promptly forgot about it. All Rosalind wanted was a way to categorize and identify. That is a cow and that is a dog and that is Olivia. The cow goes moo and the dog goes bow-wow and Olivia goes…“Livvy.” Her first word, her only word, uttered a few days before she was taken. They had joked about it at the time, how the daughter was just like her mother, so sure of her place at the center of the universe, or only a few inches to the left.

Now Cynthia couldn’t help thinking it was as if Olivia knew she might never get to say her name otherwise.

On the video, the bad fairy was throwing a fit over her missing invitation. Uninvited, sent home early-it all ends the same way, doesn’t it? The bad fairy reminded Cynthia not of Alice and Ronnie but of Sharon, and their last face-to-face meeting outside Columbia Mall summer before last.

Cynthia had been struggling with Rosalind’s carriage, a European model that was a pain in the ass-so heavy, so not-portable, so impossible for any eleven-year-old to roll away. Sharon had stood, hands empty, chattering away, never offering to help. Did Cynthia miss City Hall? What did she think of the new mayor? Sharon had finally given up, moved to the suburbs, just to have the security of knowing she had a place to park after a long day. Was that so much to ask? Did that make her a hypocrite?

Then that obtuse woman had leaned into the carriage and uttered her own form of a curse: “Why, Cynthia, I didn’t know you had a baby to replace Olivia.”

The minute the words were out, even insensitive Sharon realized she had gone too far. Her cheeks burned red in a rush of blood so bright that it washed out the odd markings on the left side of her face. She scurried away, making excuses.

Not a week later, a reporter called, her voice round with fake empathy, asking Cynthia if she wanted to tell the Beacon-Light’s readers about this bittersweet happy ending, about her triumphant second act-those had been the reporter’s words-to let Baltimoreans know how she and Warren had recovered from their horrible, horrible tragedy. Those had been her exact words, too, horrible, horrible, as if repeating the word would prove that she really understood Cynthia’s plight. That was the reporter’s term as well. Plight.

Cynthia wasn’t fooled. She was a freak, the mother of the replacement baby, the idiot who had moved back into the same trailer park after a tornado tossed her first mobile home. They wanted to put her on parade so the paper’s readers would feel safe and secure. Their babies would never be stolen, their babies would never be killed, because Cynthia Barnes had taken the fall for all of them.

Tuesday, April 7
2.

The grease smell hanging in the air behind the New York Fried Chicken on Route 40 was at least six hours old, but it still juiced Nancy Porter’s appetite as she walked back and forth between the restaurant’s rear door and the Dumpster, studying blood spatters. She had started a new diet yesterday and she was already having severe cravings, especially for anything deep-fried. To her way of thinking, there was nothing on earth-no vegetable, no meat, no piece of bread-that could not be improved by being dipped in a basket of hot oil.

Here on the part of Route 40 near where the state park began, the scent of frying oil bumped right into the generic green smells of an April morning. Cut grass, an undercurrent of lilacs, something else wild and sweet. Combined, the fried and the floral odors managed to trump the other smell on the breeze, the decadent, protein-laden fast food debris, mixed with the ferrous hangover of a young man’s death.

“What is New York Fried Chicken, anyway?” she asked her partner, Kevin Infante. “I mean, I’ve heard of southern fried chicken and Kentucky Fried Chicken and even Maryland fried chicken, but what’s New York Fried Chicken?”

“It’s a way of saying it’s better,” the Bronx-born Infante said with a lopsided grin. His chauvinism was a running gag with them, whether the topic was food or baseball, a way of bridging the ten-year gap in their ages while defusing any boy-girl stuff. Not that he was her type, under any circumstances. Infante had glossy black hair and wet-looking brown eyes, and if Nancy ’s Polish grandfather were alive, nothing in the world could have stopped him from leaning in, pretending to run a finger across the top of Infante’s head, and announcing: “Quart low.” Josef Potrcurzski may have learned to live alongside Italians and Greeks in Highlandtown most of his adult life, but he had never learned to like it much.

“I don’t know,” Nancy said, playing along. “I like the Chicago style with the thick crust that they serve over on Pennsylvania Avenue. You know, the place we go to eat on our court days.”

“That’s not pizza,” Infante said. “That’s, like, a quiche with pepperoni. New York pizza is the best, and New York hot dogs, and New York deli and New York bagels and New York taxi drivers and New York baseball-”

The last was undeniably true, so all Nancy could say was “Oh, fuck you.”

“If the sergeant knew how much you cursed when he wasn’t around, he’d be so disappointed in his sweet little Nancy.”

“Double-fuck you.”

“Is that like Doublestuf Oreos?”

Nancy felt her color rising. That was the drawback to working with a partner, even for just a few months: they learned your weaknesses awfully fast, down to the brand names. Kevin Infante knew some things about Nancy that her husband didn’t know, and Andy had been part of her life off and on since high school.

Then again, she was learning Infante’s weaknesses, too: J &B, Merit Lights, the Mets, real redheads.

“Stop talking about food, okay?”

“You started it.”

“I know. God, I hate stabbings. Give me a shooting every time.”

Infante gave her a funny look, but didn’t say anything. Nancy knew it would never occur to him to have a preference about methods. To Infante, in Homicide for five years now, there were only two types of cases, gimmes and what he called career-enders, although they never did. Not his, anyway.

And this one was clearly a gimme. The scene screamed stupidity-an absence of coolness, the telltale signs of a plan gone awry, and so much trace evidence that they could clone the whole gang of them, not that anyone but a mad scientist would want to replicate this group.

Infante crouched down next to a particularly large stain. “The blood patterns are weird, don’t you think? Were they chasing him? Was he trying to get away? Then why didn’t he run toward Route 40? No one was going to help him back here.”

“He fought,” Nancy said. “It’s instinctive, to fight back when someone comes at you with a knife.”

“Women don’t fight.”

“He wasn’t a woman. He was the New York Fried Chicken Employee of the Month seven out of the last twelve months. Maybe he even got the weapon away from them. Maybe he pulled the knife on them, and they took it away from him.”

“Them?”

“Definitely a them. One-on-one, I think this guy had a shot.”

Franklin Morris had been found in the Dumpster by the morning crew, lying on top of the previous day’s garbage. He would have looked peaceful if it weren’t for the multiple stab wounds and the fluids that had leaked out of him throughout the early morning hours. He was, by his boss’s account, a model worker in every respect. Perhaps a little humorless, but not a hard-ass, not a guy whose attitude might invite what looked to be a truly sadistic death, even by stabbing standards. Later, the medical examiner would catalog the number of stab wounds, calculate the eerily exact numbers in which his science specialized. He would note which wounds were defensive in nature, specify which cuts were superficial and which were lethal. He would take out the organs, examine and weigh them. The need for this precision was sometimes lost on Nancy. Eyeballing the scene, all she could think of was a magician passing a sword through a wicker basket again and again.

The victim’s boss, a sixty-something white man, had fallen to his knees in the parking lot and started to cry after making the ID. “He’s been with me three years,” he said. “He’s the best worker I ever had.” Nancy, conscious of the camera crews arrayed along the perimeter of the yellow crime scene tape, had hustled the boss into his restaurant, seating him at a table where he wouldn’t get in the way of the lab techs. The reporters kept trying to get her attention, flag her over, elicit a tidbit or quote, but she ignored them. That was the unofficial protocol in the county department. No one talked to the media. Not on the record, not off the record, not on background, or whatever term reporters used when wheedling. Nancy wouldn’t be caught dead talking to a reporter.

It was going on eleven o’clock now and the television trucks were in place, ready to go live at noon. The Beacon-Light reporter had come and gone, was probably already stalking the dead boy’s mama. Nancy saw the tall young corporal who handled media, Bonnie something. Nancy and Bonnie were about the same age, although Nancy had started in city PD and Bonnie had always been out here in the county. She was said to be good police, fairly solid, and an excellent marks-man, not that county cops drew their weapons very often. Yet she had asked for the communications office when the number two job had opened up. Nancy couldn’t imagine wanting a job in which you did nothing but talk to the press. She especially couldn’t imagine being smug about it, as Bonnie seemed to be. “Corporal of communications,” Infante liked to say. “Corporal of crap.”

Nancy ’s stomach growled. She had been sitting down to her breakfast, a sorry little mess of sunflower seeds and carrot juice, when the call had come in. It had almost been a relief, getting an excuse to flee that breakfast. But now she was hollow.

“Cast-iron Connie rides again,” Infante said with a twisted grin. She accepted the gibe for the compliment he thought it was. Actually, it worried her that she never got nauseous on the job, never had, not even the first time she had seen a dead body. And if that didn’t make her sick, what could?

“I didn’t have any breakfast,” she said.

“Well, we could get you some biscuits to go,” Infante taunted. He knew she was on a diet, because she had munched her way through a green salad, dressing on the side, at Applebee’s yesterday. “I’m sure the staff wouldn’t mind whipping up something for you. Let’s walk through this again. I feel like we’re missing something.”

They were. On their next trip across the parking lot, Nancy spied a shell casing. This was her trademark, her gift-and sometimes her failing as well, according to her sergeant, who called her the Goddess of Small Things, which Nancy didn’t get, but the sergeant said it had something to do with a book his wife once read for her book club. Nancy always did have an eye for details. Back in the city, where she had started, she had been credited with psychic, almost otherworldly powers. In the county, it was understood as a skill, no different from Infante’s ability to break people down in interrogation, or Lenhardt’s amazing hunches. But it was understood as a weakness, too. A detective could get lost in details. Or so her sergeant kept telling her.

“Could be from another time, another robbery,” Infante said.

“Could be,” Nancy agreed.

“Who brings a gun, fires it once, and then ends up cutting the guy?”

“Morons,” she said. “Really mean morons.”

The dead boy had owned a four-year-old Nissan Sentra, a year from being paid off, according to the records at the MVA. That was pretty much all the registration records told, but Nancy could fill in the rest, just from what the manager had told her about his employee. It would be spotless, with a pine-tree deodorizer hanging from the rearview mirror, a folded road map in the seat pocket, and a decal of some sort on the back window-a sticker for the college he had been attending part-time, Coppin, or his fraternity, if he belonged to one. Nancy had a hunch he did and that initiation had been one of the happiest days of his life.

A Ford Taurus pulled up and their sergeant, Harold Lenhardt, got out. Nancy wondered if she should take that personally. She couldn’t recall him showing up when Infante was the primary. Baltimore County averaged about thirty homicides a year, and this was only her fourth in eight months in Homicide, so it was hard to establish a statistically accurate sample. Still, it irked her, seeing Lenhardt here. He was checking up on her.

“City cops found the car,” he said by way of a greeting. “They didn’t dump and run, but parked it in a shopping center lot over near Walbrook Junction. I guess they were trying to make it hard for us. Only the Laundromat owner noticed it hadn’t moved for six hours, got pissed, and called to have it towed.”

“Does the other kid, the one who worked here last night, happen to live within walking distance of where the car was found?” Nancy asked.

“No. But-go figure-he’s been truant four days out of five at Southwestern High School most of this semester. So I checked with the principal’s office and he was present and accounted for at roll this morning for the first time in a week.”

“What time do city high schools get out?”

“Two-thirty,” Lenhardt said. “But I don’t think we can wait. We’re going to have to deprive Junior of his day of book-larning.”

“Yeah,” Nancy said, seeing it. The kid thought he was smart, showing up for school today. He was counting on them to check attendance and be complacent, wait for the end of classes to talk to him. Then he’d try to cut out by lunch, find a place to lie low for a while, avoiding the cops for as long as possible. They would find him eventually, but it would still slow them down, screw up their momentum if they didn’t get him today.

“The goddess found a casing,” Infante said, and she shot him a look. She would take that from the sergeant, but not from her partner. “But I don’t think the ME is going to find a bullet in that kid. I think it’s all slices.”

“Nasty,” Lenhardt said. “These are some nasty mother-” He remembered Nancy was there and stopped himself. He would not curse in front of Nancy, in front of any woman, under any circumstances. Nancy tried to accept this as the simple courtesy it was. But she worried there were other things Lenhardt wouldn’t say in front of her because some things could not be expressed without profanity. And these might be things she needed to know if she was ever going to be a good homicide police.

“Stabbing takes time,” Lenhardt said. “You’ve got to have a taste for what you’re doing, you stab a guy to death.”

Even Nancy knew that. That was Homicide 101.

Her cell phone rang, which was weird because hardly anyone had her cell number, only Andy and her mom. The detectives still used pagers for official work and didn’t give those numbers out to anyone if they could help it. She pulled the phone out of her purse-there was no getting around it, she had to carry a purse because she couldn’t fit her life in her back pockets and breast pockets like the guys did. Her skirts didn’t even have pockets, and the blazers she bought were hit-and-miss when it came to breast pockets. She tried to answer the call, but there was no one on the line. Then she noticed she had a small text message on the screen:

I’M COMING HOME

So what, she thought. Of course Andy was coming home. It was his day off and he had been heading out to the gym when she left for work this morning. Why would he call and tell her that? Then she thought: he wouldn’t. And her mother wouldn’t know how to text-message if you gave her a year-long course. Her parents’ VCR had been flashing 12:00 for about a decade now.

Still, she had been getting a lot of wrong numbers of late, for some girl at Kenwood High whose number was one digit off from hers. They hadn’t text-messaged before now, but it was probably inevitable. Nancy was only twenty-eight, but she already had the habit of shaking her head and thinking, “Those kids.” She couldn’t understand their desire for access, for 24/7 connectedness, their need to always be hooked up to something, anything.

Her stomach growled again, making a noise like a squeaky yawn. Lenhardt and Infante shared a smile at her expense, but didn’t invoke the nickname.

“Do we have time for a pit stop?” Nancy asked.

“Depends on where,” Lenhardt said. “We’ve got city uniforms standing by waiting to escort us into Southwestern. So we can’t dally long.”

“Something fast. Dunkin’ Donuts. Burger King.”

“Is that on the blood-type diet?” Infante asked, brow furrowed. “Or is it cabbage soup this time? Do they have cabbage doughnuts?”

Nancy waited until Lenhardt’s back was turned, then mouthed at her partner “Fuck you.” Infante shot her the finger. It was all harmless. They were kids, squabbling behind Daddy’s back, which made the job bearable for some reason. Especially when they knew it was going to be a long day, a long week. The case may have been a gimme, but even gimmes extracted their price. Nancy had still been in the academy when she learned that it wasn’t the clever perps who kept you up at night, it was the indifferent types who didn’t bother to cover their tracks, literally or figuratively. The ones who were too stupid, or too young, or maybe both.

She shook the memory off, tried to concentrate on what kind of doughnut was going to have the honor of wrecking her diet in the thirty-sixth hour.

“So,” Lenhardt said, his tone supercasual, “you let Bonnie handle the press?”

“Yeah,” Nancy said. “Absolutely.”

“Good girl.”

She loved those words. Lord help her, she loved those words.

Thursday, April 9
3.

There are no seasons in the basement of the Clarence Mitchell Courthouse, and Sharon Kerpelman sometimes had to glance at her clothes to remind herself what kind of weather she had passed through on the way to work that morning. No seasons, no weather, no sense of time passing. Today’s date was vivid in her mind because of the arrangements she had made to free her afternoon, but the day had no reality beyond her schedule; it was not connected to spring or even the day of the week, which also had a way of slipping her mind. She’d hate for anyone to know how many Saturdays she had schlepped into the shower and been half dressed before she realized the masculine voice on her radio was saying Weekend Edition, not Morning Edition.

Today-a Thursday, definitely a Thursday, a fact ascertained by a quick look at the date book in her lap-she was meeting with a family in the hallway when she saw a secretary walking past with a basket of colored eggs and chocolates, and thought, Oh, yeah, Easter. Had it come and gone, or was it about to happen? And didn’t that mean Passover was somewhere around here as well? Had she missed it? But no, her mother would never allow that to happen. Passover must be late this year, for Sharon had not yet received the annual phone call about the Seder and whether she was going to bring a date, and what would she think if her mother invited the Kutchners’ son, who had just moved back to Baltimore and was very nice.

Her client’s little sister, no more than five or six, followed the basket with a gaze full of longing and guilt, as if she knew better than to yearn for anything. The client himself, twelve years old and facing his second charge for selling drugs, was staring at the ground, bored by his own fate. His mother stood over Sharon, hands on her hips, jittery from want of a cigarette.

“Cullen,” the mother was wailing. “How’m I gonna see him if he’s all that way out there? I got no car. I thought he was going to Hickey, if he went at all. You said probation, maybe home detention. You promised.”

“I promised I’d try. It’s his second offense. Didn’t help that it was on the school grounds.”

“So why not Hickey?”

“Cullen has a bed in its unit for kids with addiction problems. Gordon’s not going to stop selling drugs until he stops using them. Besides, it’s smaller. He’d get eaten alive at Hickey.”

“Cullen won’t do,” the mother said, as if she had a say in the matter. She was furious, with the kind of fury peculiar to the nonpaying client. Those who can’t afford private attorneys, Sharon had learned in her decade as a public defender, assumed legal aid was incompetent. Do-gooders were simply losers in disguise.

“Hit’s only his second offense,” the mother hissed in the strange mountain accent that had somehow survived for decades in Baltimore, the legacy of the West Virginians who flooded into the city during World War II. Sharon secretly thought of their descendants as the fish-white people, evolutionary holdouts holed up in the city’s last white precincts. She knew these people better than she wanted to, for she had tried living in some of the neighborhoods they favored, beguiled by the old stone mill houses in one, the cheap loft spaces in the other. In the end, her hillbilly neighbors had driven her out, all the way to the suburbs, to a sterile condo behind a gate. At least she had tried.

“Look, your son started sniffing spray paint when he was eight. He has been smoking marijuana since he was ten. It’s only a matter of time before he moves on to speed or OxyContin.”

“I don’t use. I just sell a little,” Gordon said, primed to tell the lie over and over. His idea or his mother’s? Sharon wondered. His mother couldn’t honestly believe that her son didn’t use. Every time Sharon saw him, he had watery, bloodshot eyes and this spacey can’t-give-a-shit demeanor. Not that she blamed him. Hell, she’d use, too, if this were her mother, her life.

Sharon ignored his rote excuses. “I know it’s hard for you, Mrs. Beamer, him being so far away. But it’s the best thing. There’s something to be said for getting him out of the city. Kids at Hickey don’t get that same culture shock, that sense of displacement. Besides, Hickey’s too…too…”

The bailiff called them to court. Sharon stood, finishing the thought for herself. More and more, Hickey seemed to her an internment camp for teenagers, the place where Maryland was holding its potential enemies until some undeclared war finally ended. She hated to send anyone under fifteen to Hickey. Boys Village, near D.C., was worse still, Middlebrook the worst of all.

She shook out the folds of her dress, creased from sitting for so long. The saffron-colored dress was high waisted, with a long, voluminous skirt falling to her ankles. Heavy cotton, more of a winter dress than a spring one. The forecast for today must have been unseasonably cool for her to have chosen this dress. Or was it because she wanted to look nice, for later, and this was her best dress?

Gordon’s mother studied the way Sharon smoothed her skirt, the self-satisfied pats to the rich fabric.

“You pregnant?”

The question was supposed to hurt, and it did. The woman was punishing Sharon, getting back at her the only way she could. Send my kid to Cullen? Fine, then I’ll make you feel fat. Sharon actually had a good figure. She just preferred to keep it to herself, enjoying the glad surprise on her dates’ faces when she finally disrobed.

“No-no,” she stammered. “It’s just a very loose dress.”

“Oh. I thought you was, but more because of your face.”

One insult withdrawn, another offered. If Sharon hadn’t picked up her briefcase and Gordon’s file, her hand might have flown up to her cheek. But there was no texture to the mark, nothing to feel there, other than the rush of blood.

“I thought it was, you know, that mask of pregnancy women sometimes get. I hear birth control pills can cause it, too.”

“No, it’s just…my skin.”

“Like a birthmark.”

“Well, I was born with it, so yes, I guess you could call it a birthmark.”

She herself barely noticed it, any more than she would notice how her eyes were spaced, or how closely her ears pressed to her head. She almost liked the lacy pattern on the left side of her jaw and cheek, and had convinced herself that others might, too. It was a delicate spotting, as if a grid of freckles had slipped. No one had mentioned it for years.

Almost seven years, come to think of it. Here, in this very hallway, after the juvenile master had passed sentence on Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller.

Sharon didn’t have to close her eyes to recapture the day. After all, they had stood just here, in this same hallway, moving quickly because the reporters who had been banned from the hearing had been bearing down on them, and everyone was intent on getting the girls out and away, into the vans that waited on the north side of the courthouse. They were also trying to provide some cover for the parents, whose images had been used repeatedly in the media accounts, given that the girls themselves were off-limits.

Alice had looked shocked, too scared and numb to cry. But Ronnie, who had been almost catatonic throughout the whole ordeal, erupted as the girls were led away. She had actually fought her own lawyer, raking her fingernails down his cheek, kicking one of the bailiffs in the chest when her lawyer turned her around and caught her in a bear hug that was meant to still her. She bit and clawed as if she wanted to be in handcuffs, wanted them to confront the inherent lie in the proceedings. No one, not even Ronnie Fuller’s earnest young lawyer, believed she was anything but a stone-cold killer. But the state had agreed to treat her like a child. Like a human, when all those who met her couldn’t help wondering why she was so inhuman. She smiled at the wrong time, laughed at the wrong things, said whatever came into her head.

Still, she was literally a little girl, no more than eighty pounds. They couldn’t strike back or use the usual methods to control her. Ronnie seemed to sense the adults’ tentativeness, their confusion, and her flailing limbs appeared to multiply, so it was as if she had four arms, four legs, then eight, then sixteen. She was like the cartoon Tasmanian Devil, a whirlwind of motion, and everyone else was struck dumb and motionless. Photographers, trying to find positions that would allow them to capture the moment without showing Ronnie’s grinning face, ended up tripping the lawyer, and Ronnie was suddenly free, running down the corridor. In her blind fury, she chose a dead end, and two policewomen finally managed to subdue her.

Watching the whole episode, her hand on Alice’s shoulder, Sharon had known a horrible moment of gratitude that she had not drawn the assignment to defend Ronnie-and then such overwhelming guilt for her revulsion that she felt obligated to comfort her.

She whispered encouragement as the policewomen rushed the girl through the corridors, Ronnie’s feet barely touching the floor. She murmured things more important in tone than content, the way one speaks to a dog. It will be okay, don’t be scared, we’re trying to help you. They were almost to the door, the sunlight creating a glare around the edges, like a passageway in a fairy tale or a science fiction film, a door leading to another world. As the policewomen carried Ronnie over the threshold, the girl turned her head and fairly spat in Sharon ’s face: “Get away from me, you ugly spotted bitch. This is all your fault.”

Ronnie’s lawyer was in private practice within a year, defending “real criminals,” as he explained the next time Sharon saw him in Au Bon Pain, where their salad tongs crossed over the stainless steel bowl of string beans.

“I mean, you know, grown-ups,” he said.

“They’re less scary,” he added, and they had laughed, pretending he hadn’t spoken the truth.

Sharon looked at the client of the moment, Gordon Beamer, twelve years old and, unless a miracle happened at Victor Cullen, pretty permanently fucked. Not even ten years into her job, she was beginning to see the second generation, the children of the children she had defended when she started working for the PD’s office. The only thing that really changed was the drugs. Crack cocaine had ebbed, and now it was more heroin and OxyContin, a little Ecstasy for the suburbanites who came to the city to cop. How soon before she saw the third generation, the grandchildren of her original clients? If Sharon were really successful at her job, wouldn’t it cease to exist?

Funny, her first and last homicide case had proved to be Alice ’s. The state routinely “promoted” violent offenders to the adult system now-fifteen and up was virtually automatic, and it was rare to see anyone, boy or girl, charged with homicide at a younger age. So the young killers passed her by, and her expertise was of little use.

“Let’s roll this rock up the hill,” she said on a sigh.

“What rock?” Wanda Beamer demanded. “They got rocks at Cullen?”

She didn’t wait for the answer to her own question, for she noticed her daughter had wandered off to stare at the children’s paintings that were supposed to add some joy to this grim corridor. She shrieked the little girl’s name-Amber-grabbed her, and paddled her hard. The girl cried without making a sound. Gordon Beamer stared at the ceiling. So did Sharon, thinking about how it was only a few hours until she finally got to see Alice again.

4.
11:35 A.M.

Helen Manning took her lunch outside, thinking she might find a bench, or at least a ledge on which she could sit. But the day was chilly, as only early spring could be, and she ended up in her car, barely tasting her carefully assembled meal-chicken salad, which she had enlivened with tarragon and pecans and spread on a whole wheat baguette, cold asparagus in a vinaigrette sauce, a small bottle of sparkling water.

A floater rotating among several city elementary schools, Helen usually made a point of eating and mingling with the other teachers. So much was projected onto a pretty woman if she was the least bit self-contained. Helen had accepted long ago that she had to work hard to convince others that she wasn’t remote or snobbish.

Today, however, Helen was too depressed to summon the energy for the polite, super-interested persona she had cultivated. Instead, she sat in her car and chewed on her sandwich, staring blindly through the windshield. It was a good neighborhood, a yuppie enclave with long rows of white-flowering fruit trees that made the streets look like a lane from a fairy tale. And yet Helen had detected a dark, Grimm-like aspect, although it had taken her a while to diagnose exactly what was wrong, what was missing. Children. The yuppies all moved as soon as they had kids. The students in the public school came from the tougher, less desirable neighborhoods that fringed the area.

Helen, who had grown up in Connecticut before coming to Baltimore for college, had never gotten used to the springs here. She had no nostalgia for the wind-whipped house on the Sound, or for her mother’s prissy formal garden, which was barren much of the year. But spring came on so fast in Baltimore. It might be cold today, but within a week the city would be lush as a jungle, riotous with azaleas, the leaves on the trees fat and swollen. It was a gaudy time, almost obscene, like the burst of hormones that surged through some of her students. This change was particularly striking to Helen because she saw the children at seven-day intervals. One week, a sixth-grade girl would be gawky and careless, skipping across the playground. The next, she would be round and juicy, hunched over with self-consciousness.

Helen had no scientific evidence, but she was sure that girls had not developed so early in her day. She wouldn’t be surprised to find out it was linked to fast food or that bovine growth hormone in milk. She had heard stories about seven-year-olds with breasts and periods. The doctors at Hopkins were trying to figure out how to arrest their puberty without turning them into midgets.

Now Helen always had very good eating habits. She wasn’t a zealot, but she had always chosen whole grains and vegetables and fresh fruits, hopeful that Alice would follow her example. Of course Alice had ended up yearning for the junkiest of junk foods, and Helen had capitulated, taking her to McDonald’s or Arby’s at least once a week, in the belief that small indulgences would keep Alice from becoming obsessive. Hunger had been the one uncontrollable urge in her otherwise obedient daughter.

Where would Alice ask to go to lunch today, after Sharon picked her up down at Middlebrook? Alice would probably want something fast and greasy, while Sharon would feel compelled to make an event out of it, a celebration-more like high school graduation than what it was.

“I know you can’t get off in the middle of the week,” Sharon had said when she called Helen about Alice ’s release date. “But I could meet her at the hearing in your place, and bring her home. Really, it’s no trouble.”

Would Helen have lied if Sharon hadn’t all but offered this out to her? She wasn’t sure. But given the assumption that she couldn’t be there, she was glad to take advantage of it. She understood, however, that she would be in Sharon ’s debt. For when Sharon said something wasn’t any trouble-really-she meant it was a lot of trouble, but she would do it anyway. Sharon had never quite let go of the Mannings, much to Helen’s dismay. Everyone else wanted to forget, move on, bury the past. Only Sharon Kerpelman seemed to glory in the memory of that summer, as if it were something of which she was proud. True, she had been aggressive in Alice ’s defense, shrewd even. But Helen couldn’t help wondering if she should have taken her parents’ offer and hired an expensive criminal attorney who might have saved Alice in spite of everything.

But no, that would have been wrong. She had decided early on that she could not rationalize away Alice ’s role by saying she was the accessory, the dupe, the unwitting follower. There was a principle at stake. Alice had to be held accountable along with Ronnie.

Alice had understood. Alice always understood. She was Helen’s confidante, her one-girl fan club, her best audience. Even when she saw through one of Helen’s white lies-and Alice, unlike Sharon, would know that Helen could have gotten today off if she really wanted to-she forgave her. She was a considerate child.

A woman, Helen reminded herself. Alice had left home a child, but she was a woman now under the law, free to vote, if not to drink. Helen remembered a song from her own grade-school days: Girl, you’re a woman now. Sung, Helen suddenly realized, by the same pop star who had told the young girl to get out of his mind. Yes, the songs of Gary Puckett and the Union Gap had a lovely progression. “Young Girl.” “Girl, You’re a Woman Now.” “Lady Willpower.” And then finally, inevitably, simply: “Woman Woman (Have you got cheatin’ on your mind?).” Why, it had the arc of a novel. It was goddamn Madame Bovary. Good line. She wished she knew someone who would appreciate it.

Helen had been a pretty juicy teenager herself, although she had waited until college to explore those options. The joke among her faster high school friends was that Helen couldn’t have sex in the same state as her parents. And the joke behind the joke was that it was absolutely true. She had come to Baltimore ’s Maryland Institute College of Art as an eighteen-year-old virgin and, within weeks, was the Whore of MICA. Not that anyone called her a whore, because everyone who could was doing the same thing, and people weren’t so judgmental about sex back then, especially at art school.

God, her generation had caught the wave just right. That was the golden time, the post-herpes-but-not-yet-AIDS era, when everyone had given up on free love, but sex was cheap and plentiful, like the marijuana of the day. All changed, changed utterly. People in the marijuana trade killed one another now, according to a “special report” Helen had seen on television just this past winter. Astonishing to Helen, more astonishing than any act of terror. Almost as astonishing as her own life.

She was twenty-four, halfway toward her master’s, when she got pregnant. It was like hitting a reverse lottery, a 1-in-100 shot. But even pregnancy wasn’t a big deal in those days. Abortion was an acceptable choice among her friends, backup birth control, almost a rite of passage. It didn’t even require much thought. If the stick turned blue, and it wasn’t love and wasn’t going to be, you took care of it. The noble thing was not even to mention it to the guy, unless he was a live-in, because it was a lose-lose. He either tried to eel out of the situation, in which case you had to face up to the fact that the guy you were dating was a jerk. Or, worse, he made a halfhearted proposal and there it sat between you, like a jury summons-your civic duty, sure, but everyone still tried to get out of it.

So having a baby was kind of cool. Brave, even. Especially when the father was some BG &E meter reader, Roy Durske, met at a friend’s apartment pool. They dated all summer. “Dated” being Roy ’s insistent euphemism. Helen had no problems classifying their meetings as screwing. Good the first few times, but the novelty of the whole adventure had worn off fast. Sheer enthusiasm could take a man only so far.

The bell at the Catholic church began to toll the noon hour. Helen glanced at her dashboard clock. She had used up her allotted twenty-five minutes for lunch. The early and short lunch hour was one of the antiperks that served to remind Helen how little valued her chosen profession was. She balled up the foil from her sandwich, capped her empty bottle, snapped her Tupperware, and put everything in the old metal workman’s lunchbox she’d found at a yard sale last year. People were always knocked out by Helen’s taste-“By what you get away with,” as one coworker once put it. But Helen was bored by her own originality, her irreverence. What had it gained her in the end? Twenty years of teaching art to nonartists, a life alone, and a daughter who called her bluff. Want to be daring, Mom? Want to be a true iconoclast? Try being the mother of an eleven-year-old who kills another child. And not just another child, but the granddaughter of a beloved black judge.

Then leave your mother to face the world’s judgment.

They couldn’t use Helen’s name, for that would have been the same as identifying Alice, but the local television stations had somehow rationalized showing Helen’s face as she ducked in and out of various government buildings that summer. She wore dark glasses, her hair pulled up in a way she had never worn it before and never wore it again. But people knew, of course. They knew which girls had been sent home from the pool party after what was reported as a “racial incident,” knew which children disappeared from the neighborhood, as if they had never existed. But no one ever said anything, because what would they say? Saw you on the news. Sorry your kid killed that baby. What are you doing this weekend?

Helen went inside and began setting up her next class, taping newspaper to the desks, straightening the little chairs, the style of which had not changed since she was in fifth grade. For all she knew, these chairs could have been in service during her fifth-grade year. The city system was pretty poor. She definitely remembered colors like these, seventies colors, colors that embodied the promises of the modern age. Aqua blue. Mod orange. Now these were the ironic, self-conscious shades of iMacs and junior high school fashions. She remembered an outfit, purchased for her first plane trip-an orange-, blue-, and brown-striped dress with a matching scarf, from the old Best & Co. Her mother had saved all Helen’s clothes, and Helen had taken it out of a box when Alice was the same age. But she was too big for it. Hormones. It had to be hormones.

Thank God the afternoon classes would be fourth-graders. They were still baby sweet, unlike the middle-school-bound fifth-graders. The fourth-graders reminded her of Alice, the lost Alice. In remembering her daughter, Helen always imagined her from the back-the part in her hair, two tails of yellow hanging down on either side of her head, tied with bows that Helen fashioned from fabric remnants and Christmas ribbon. She conjured up her smell, which was sharpest at the back of her neck, varying with the day and the weather. Chalk, soap, grass, suntan lotion, chlorine, peanut butter, pickles. She saw that neck bent over the kitchen table, intent on a project-a Christmas gift, homemade Valentines-saying to herself, as she must have heard Helen say: “Homemade is nicer.” She was so good, there was no other word for it.

But Alice ’s goodness, her very lack of reproach, became a reproach. “I did something bad,” she would say to Helen in their last days together, tentative, hopeful of contradiction. “When you do something bad, you have to be punished.”

“Yes, baby,” Helen had said. Show them how strong you are, and then one day they’ll realize you’re really a good girl, that it was just a mistake. It was a mistake, wasn’t it, baby? A mistake, an accident? Whose idea was it, baby? You can tell me. Tell Mama what happened. I know the truth is sad, but it’s important to tell the truth. Always, always. It’s better if we know everything. Maybe it will change things. Nothing’s really done, nothing’s really decided, not yet. Just tell the truth, Alice.

But Alice had shaken her head, refusing to tell Helen anything. “Everything’s decided now,” she had said. “I have to go away.”

That was the night before the final hearing, the formal sentencing. On top of everything else, Alice had just gotten her period for the first time, and they were in the bathroom, fixing her up, soaking her underpants in cold water. Menstruating at eleven, not even in sixth grade. Helen had started at thirteen, and her mother thought that was young.

Helen had given Alice the sex talk in bits and pieces over the years, so Alice wasn’t scared. She was so placid, so composed, that Helen couldn’t help trying to shake her up, make her treat the moment as more of a milestone.

“In my day, we didn’t have these adhesive-backed pads. We had to wear little belts,” she said. “With teeth.”

The image startled Alice, sitting on the toilet with a sanitary napkin in her hand.

“Did the teeth bite?” she had asked, eyes round, and Helen regretted mentioning it.

“No, they weren’t teeth-teeth. Just little holders, for the napkin’s tabs. You’re lucky. But remember, you have to be responsible now. You’re still a little girl, but your body thinks it’s a woman. Don’t forget that, okay?”

That damn song popped up again, lodged in Helen’s brain the way only an unwelcome melody can burrow in. Girl-you’re a woman now. Strangely, it brought a memory with it, but not of when Helen first heard it. Instead, she saw herself sitting on the edge of that useless kidney-shaped pool at the apartment complex off I-83, the summer after her first year of graduate school. Suddenly, anachronistically, she could remember everything-the seat of her suit pulling at the rough-textured concrete, the sun on her back, the baby oil cupped in her palm, ready to anoint her lovely freckled shoulders. And then Roy surfaced, shaking his hair, so long by today’s standards, water streaming down his well-formed chest, looking almost as good as he thought he did.

“You live around here?” he asked, and she smiled at the sheer stupidity of his come-on, delighted that he was dumb, because then she wouldn’t fall in love with him, she could just fuck him for the summer and move on, happy and carefree. She had been right about that much, at least. She hadn’t fallen in love with him. For all she knew, he could have come and read her meter over the past decade, and she wouldn’t have recognized him.

Had he recognized Helen, in her sunglasses and piled-up hair seven years ago, racing across his television set? Had he realized his daughter was one of the “pair of eleven-year-old killers” mentioned incessantly on the news, in the paper, until the phrase lost its ability to shock? Even if he had, Helen couldn’t fault him for not coming forward and confessing to Alice ’s paternity.

She probably wouldn’t have either, given the choice.

5.
2 P.M.

“Don’t you want dessert? They make great sundaes here.”

Alice looked up from her plate, where half of her cheeseburger and most of her french fries still sat. She wasn’t trying to impress Sharon with her willpower-she never worried about impressing Sharon -and she wasn’t self-conscious about her appetite. She plain didn’t like this cheeseburger, which had come with Cheddar instead of American cheese, or these fries, which were too real to Alice ’s way of thinking, with the skins still attached, and soft, lumpy insides, damp with oil.

“I bet you didn’t have anything like this at Middlebrook,” Sharon had said when their meals arrived, clasping her hands together as if she might say grace.

No, Alice thought. What we had was better. Thin, crispy fries, which went straight from the freezer to the fryer. Not as good as McDonald’s fries, which were the best, but better than these flabby things. Actually, the food at Middlebrook had been pretty good all-around. It may have had the worst reputation in the state, but it had the best food.

“Really,” Sharon said, “have a sundae.” Sharon loved that word: really. Really, Alice, you have to trust me. Really, Alice, this is for the best. Really, Alice, I believe you. But what did really really mean when Sharon said it? Did it indicate that everything else Sharon said was fake? Or was it supposed to show that what followed was extra-real, really-real, super-size real?

“I don’t need a sundae,” Alice said. “Really.”

“Today’s not a day to worry about calories. Treat yourself.”

Oh, so she should worry about calories, just not today. “I guess I have to go on a diet,” Alice said, head lowered over her plate, maintaining contact with Sharon ’s puppy-brown eyes through the fringe of her pale lashes.

“No, no, that’s not what I meant at all,” Sharon said. “Everyone has to worry about calories. Just not every day. It’s important to build a treat day into your schedule.”

“But I’m fat,” Alice said. “Didn’t you notice? I got really fat while I was in Middlebrook.”

She loved this word, adored making cruel pronouncements about herself. I’m fat. I’m ugly. I’m clumsy. She wasn’t looking for automatic contradictions. In fact, she didn’t actually hold herself in such low esteem. No, she just liked the way adults panicked when she spoke this way, enjoyed their frantic reassurances. Sticks and stones, grown-ups said when you were little. Turned out they were the ones who feared words.

“Oh, no, honey, you shouldn’t talk that way. You’re just…big-boned, like I am. And the diet was so starchy there, and you didn’t get enough exercise, and, well, what with everything, you put on what some people call the ‘freshman fifteen.’ ”

“Only I’m not a freshman,” Alice said. “I’m a graduate. I got my GED.”

“Freshman year of college,” Sharon said. “Because that’s when most kids are away from home for the first time, making their own choices…” Her voice trailed off miserably.

“So I’m precocious,” Alice said.

“Yes,” Sharon said, clearly not getting it. “Yes, you are.”

“I’ve got the freshman fifty-and I won’t start college until the fall.”

“You’re going to go to college, then?” Sharon bobbed her head. She was so easy to please, there was no joy in it. “Where? What do you plan to study?”

“Community college. I have to get a part-time job and help pay my way.” She gave Sharon a sly look. “It’s hard to get scholarships, coming out of Middlebrook.”

Sharon took this as a rebuke. Alice knew she would. No one had ever wanted Alice ’s approval as much as Sharon Kerpelman did. The slightest suggestion that Alice ’s life was less than it might be was wounding to this woman, who seemed to feel Alice owed her gratitude and affection, if not downright love. Sharon cared about Alice, she announced often, a note of pride in her voice. Sharon ’s pride was what kept Alice from returning her affection. Sharon could not think so well of herself for sticking by Alice unless sticking by Alice was a weird thing to do.

“You know what you should do?” Sharon asked, changing the subject.

Alice was interested in spite of herself. She was quite keen to know what she should do. She always had been. She liked those magazine articles with rules and checklists. She tore them out and tried to follow them, but it was never as easy as it looked. There was always something-an ingredient, an assumption-that kept her from completing everything as prescribed. Kosher salt, for example, for homemade pedicures. She wasn’t sure what that was, and how it was different from other salt. Not that she would have been allowed to give herself any kind of spa treatment at Middlebrook, but she had been looking ahead to a day when she could.

Sharon leaned forward. “You should walk,” she said triumphantly. “You’d be surprised what it does for the body. Just lots and lots of walking. Whenever I go visit friends in New York, I can eat whatever I want because I walk everywhere.”

Sharon beamed at her own brilliance, nodding and smiling, looking for some kind of response. Alice felt stranded, the way she often did in conversations, as if she were standing on an ice floe and needed to leap to another one. The whole sequence mystified her: Walking. Friends. So Sharon had friends? Friends in New York, no less. Why did she have friends in New York? Wasn’t she from Baltimore? Hadn’t she told Alice that a hundred times, how she had grown up less than a mile from Alice, on the other side of the park, in that place with the stupid name?

“My grandparents live in Connecticut,” Alice said at last. Connecticut was right next to New York. It was all she had to offer, conversationally. She had never been there herself, but she had heard her mother speak of it. It was known as the Nutmeg State. To spell it, you have to Connect i to Cut. Connecticut.

“Yes, I remember your grandparents. Have you talked to them lately?”

“No.” Sharon frowned, full of pity. “But then, I never did. Talk to them much. I only saw them once a year, before. They came down a couple of times, at first, but my grandmother said it was too hard.”

“How selfish.” Sharon almost yelped the last word, and people nearby jumped, as if a glass had tumbled to the floor.

Alice thought about the word selfish, turned it over and over in her mind. Certain words had an almost hypnotic effect. Always candid Helen had told Alice about her own “youthful experiments”-Helen’s phrase-with marijuana and other drugs, and how a single word could become the funniest thing in the world for no reason. But you didn’t have to be high to latch onto a word. Selfish. Related to the self, of course. But ish was usually reserved for those things that were inexact-oneish, warmish, newish-or kind of gross. Oh, ish, her friend Wendy would squeal when something offended her. It was cute, even the boys thought so, but only Wendy, who was petite, could get away with that kind of baby talk. Alice would have been mocked for lisping.

“ Alice?” Sharon prompted.

“They’re not really selfish,” she said, now that she had worked the word out for herself. “They just live so far away.”

Which was, of course, what Helen had said to Alice, as if she were trying to convince herself. They were old, older than most parents, and Da hated to fly, and Ma-Ma hated Da to drive, and it was such a pain taking the commuter train into Grand Central, then getting on Amtrak over at Penn Station, so they just couldn’t visit that often. Alice understood.

“Well, I’m sure they love you very much,” Sharon said.

“They do.”

“That’s what I just said.”

“Not as if you believed it.”

Alice stared hard at Sharon until the woman finally looked away, pretending to study the toy airplanes hung from the ceiling of the restaurant. Her lawyer had changed very little over the seven years. Of course, Alice had changed so much that everyone else’s changes seemed inconsequential. But she had noticed the subtle differences in her mother’s face, even though she saw her far more often than Sharon. Helen had kept herself up. That was her term, another phrase that had stuck in Alice ’s brain, for it suggested an image of her mother in scaffolding, men working away with paint and brushes. She kept herself up.

But over the past two years, Helen had begun to look her age, no more, no less. She knew it, too, and claimed to be complacent about it. “The French actress Catherine Deneuve said a woman over forty has to choose her face or her fanny,” Helen had said to Alice on her last visit to Middlebrook. “I’m going the fanny route.” And she had patted her slender hip-her “yoga butt,” as she had taken to calling it-and laughed. Alice had laughed, too, for it was her favorite version of Helen. Breezy, a little silly, talking about things that no one else on Nottingham Road could make sense of.

And as long as Helen worried about her own looks, she didn’t worry too much about Alice ’s. She was philosophical when Alice started putting on weight two years ago, said the body knew what it needed and that Alice ’s body was probably reacting instinctively to needs Alice didn’t even realize she had.

“It’s like your body thinks you’re a bear, in hibernation. Maybe it’s because they have you on this rigid eating schedule. You don’t get to eat when you’re hungry, you have to eat when they say you do, so your metabolism slows, in case they start starving you.”

Alice had a different theory. She believed she had a tumor. Someone had left behind a newspaper-a real newspaper, not one of those shameful things from the supermarket racks-with a story about a woman at Johns Hopkins who had a 180-pound tumor in her stomach. No one could figure out why she was gaining weight. Then they took the tumor out, and she was normal again.

The local newspaper did not have a photograph of the tumor, but the writer described it as-the words were burned into Alice ’s memory-“an onion-shaped growth the color of a brown egg and covered with fine, silky hair.” Alice took to pressing her fists into her abdomen, looking for signs of a growth. The skin was soft, yielding, yet she thought there might be something unwanted beneath its folds. Finally, she went to the infirmary and asked if there was a tumor test. The doctor was kind, listening intently with no expression on her tired face. She took notes, prodded Alice all over, asked her questions.

“I’m afraid that it’s just, uh, a fairly normal weight gain, given your circumstances,” she had said apologetically, as if she, too, had wanted to find a tumor. “It comes down to arithmetic-calories expended subtracted from calories consumed.”

“I’m good at math,” Alice told the doctor. “I always was. I’m doing Algebra II, but if I were in a regular school, I’d probably do Trig and even Calculus.”

“I bet you are. So here’s what you do-keep a little notebook, jotting down what you eat. You’ll see that you’re taking in more calories than you think. Don’t try to change the way you eat at first. Just observe yourself.”

“Like the woman who watches the monkeys?” Alice had seen a special about a famous anthropologist, although she couldn’t remember when, or what the woman learned from all her notes.

“Yes. No. I mean-take notes for a week or two, and include how you feel when you eat. Learn your own patterns, and then adjust accordingly. Portion control is half the battle. It’s not what we eat so much, but the fact that we eat so much of it.”

Disappointed that she did not have a tumor inside her, with or without fine, silky hair, Alice had never even started the notebook. But now, sitting in this too-cheery diner with Sharon, she considered the idea. Girls in books were always keeping notebooks, or diaries. She could do that, she supposed. But she knew she wouldn’t. Not because she lacked discipline. She had plenty of discipline. But she wouldn’t want to tell anyone, even a book, everything about herself. Before a day passed, she knew she would be hiding things. Because someone else would read it. She had never heard of anyone keeping a diary that someone didn’t read.

“So what’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get home?” Sharon asked out of the blue.

“Open the door?”

Sharon threw back her head and laughed her startling thunder-clap of a laugh, although Alice had not meant to make a joke.

“Very good. One point for Alice. No, I mean are you going to look for a job, or enroll in summer school? Have you learned how to drive? I could teach you, if you like. You’ll need to know.”

“Why? We only have one car, and my mom uses it for work. She teaches art in a summer program, you know.”

“Well, you may have a job one day, and you’ll need to drive to work.”

Alice thought about this. “I can take the bus.”

“Sure, for now. Depending on where the job is. But don’t you want to learn to drive?”

She should say yes. Yes would be the normal answer, and Alice was so keen to do and say the normal things, the expected things. Which were not, of course, always the truthful things, or the things she really wanted to do. She was back on her ice floe, looking for a place to jump. Or maybe a conversation was more like a game of Twister, which Helen sometimes played with Alice and Ronnie on rainy summer weekends. Right arm-red. Left leg-blue. You had to figure out how to keep your balance, how not to fall over, while still following directions. You could twist yourself up some, but not too much.

“I like those new Volkswagen Beetles,” she offered.

This pleased Sharon for some reason. She squealed with delight, bobbed her head. “Me, too.” Then her gaze shifted and her eyes widened, a sign that Sharon was about to become Very Serious. “What are you not going to do, Alice?”

It was true, Alice thought. Almost no one’s eyes are the same size. And Sharon ’s right eye was a lot bigger than her left.

“ Alice?”

“I’m not going to do anything…bad. Never again.”

“I know you won’t. But specifically, what’s the one thing you should not do?”

Not kill anyone? But not even Sharon would ask Alice such a question. Sharon believed in Alice, always had. You didn’t have to understand a person in order to believe in her.

“I’m not going to”-she struggled, trying to figure out what would be the worst thing she could do-“be idle.”

“That’s a good idea. Idle hands…” Sharon laughed, an apologetic bark, although Alice couldn’t see what was funny. “I think the key thing is that you shouldn’t see, or talk to, Ronnie.”

Alice looked up, amazed. How could anyone think she wanted to see Ronnie?

“Her family moved. My mom said.”

“Yes, but they’re not that far away. They’re just off Route 40 now, in those row houses near the old Korvette’s.”

“Korvette’s?”

“It’s a Metro now. But when I was a kid, it was a discount department store, like Kmart or Target. I bought my first record album there.” Sharon seemed on the verge of going off into one of her long stories about her childhood, stories that mystified Alice, for they seemed to be told to show how much alike Sharon and Alice were. Yet they always ended up proving the opposite.

Luckily, Sharon didn’t succumb to one of her odd reveries this time. “Look-Ronnie had really serious problems. That’s why she went to a different place than you did.”

“Harkness.”

“What?”

“She went to Harkness, right? The one near D.C.” The old grievance still gnawed. Ronnie had gone to Harkness. Alice had been stuck in Middlebrook.

“She started out at Harkness. She finished somewhere else. Anyway, all I’m saying is that she deserves a new start as much as you do. But I don’t think you two can be friends again.”

“We weren’t friends,” Alice said. After all these years, she couldn’t let this pass. She didn’t always mind when people got it wrong and said she killed Olivia Barnes, but she wasn’t going to be known as Ronnie Fuller’s friend.

“Right,” Sharon said, with a bright, placating smile. “Now, are you sure you don’t want a sundae?”

“I guess I will. After all, starting tomorrow, I’m going to be walking a lot.”

“You are? Oh, that’s great, Alice, just great. Really.”

Was it great because walking was good for her, or great because it was Sharon ’s advice? Alice had learned long ago not to ask such questions out loud. But she had never stopped thinking them. Sometimes, she felt her fat was like a cave, and she lived far inside it, watching the world with glowing eyes.

Saturday, April 11
6.

Ronnie Fuller was used to waking in the morning with strange yearnings. She just kept forgetting she was now in a position to do something about them. Some of them, at least.

She had been home for almost a month, for her birthday was in March, a few weeks before Alice ’s, a fact that almost no one ever remembered: Ronnie had a birthday, too, and it came first. Still, even after a month at home, she had to think for a moment when she opened her eyes before she could place herself in the world. Her new room, a middle bedroom with no windows, was dark as a submarine and somewhat plain. Her mother had said Ronnie could do whatever she wanted with it, but Ronnie couldn’t think of what to do.

On this particular Saturday morning, she awoke with a desire for honeysuckle, but it would be another two months before the first blossoms appeared, longer still before they could be sucked. She decided to look for a substitute at the convenience store at the foot of the long, winding hill where her parents now lived. She had the day off, so she walked straight there as soon as she was dressed. After surveying her choices through the fogged glass, she selected a Mountain Dew. She knew it wouldn’t taste like honeysuckle, but the color was close.

The dark-skinned, turbaned man at the counter took her money without comment. “Terrorist,” she said, intending it to be a question inside her head, but somehow it slipped out. That happened to Ronnie a lot. She tried to keep her thoughts to herself, but they made themselves known, which usually got her in trouble. It didn’t seem fair.

“Seek,” he said angrily, pointing to his forehead. “Seek.” Seek what, Ronnie wondered. Sick? Was he saying he was sick? Her mind was so busy turning over those questions that she turned the wrong way leaving the store, walking toward the old house by force of habit. Or so she told herself.

Ronnie had arrived on her parents’ new-to-her doorstep on a March day of record-breaking heat, a black nylon overnight bag weighing down her right shoulder. The house had been empty, for both her parents were still at work, and the last brother had moved out months ago. She found the promised key under a flat rock in the front flowerbed, and let herself in.

Familiar furnishings marked the new place as “home,” whatever that was, and it was clearly nicer than the old one. Her father used to say the town house on Nottingham was built of cereal boxes-it was damp and frail, the walls yielding easily if someone happened to bump them hard, or even throw a punch. And with three boys around, those things happened. Bumps. Punches.

On that hot March day, it hadn’t occurred to Ronnie to be disappointed that no one was there to welcome her. Her parents worked, that was a fact of life, the acceptable answer to all sorts of requests-back-to-school night, cupcakes for the holiday party, field trips. Besides, Ronnie had gotten a nice send-off on the other end-not a ceremony, which would have been queer, but a handshake from her doctor and hugs from some of the staff. One of the counselors had given her a gift-wrapped box, which Ronnie had tucked away in her overnight bag, automatically saving it for later. She hadn’t been able to give a lot of presents over the past few years, so she didn’t realize people liked to see their gifts opened. And if someone had tried to tell her as much, she would have been puzzled by this information. Better to give than to receive, right? The giving should be enough.

“Try not to jostle it too much,” the counselor had said.

“Is it fragile?”

“Not exactly. But-well, you’ll see. When you get home.”

The counselor liked Ronnie. All the staff did, for she had been one of the better-behaved kids in the unit. Most of the juvenile offenders assigned to the Shechter unit were sullen teenagers whose borderline felonies, things like robbery and car theft, had been compounded by addiction problems. But Ronnie had all but auditioned to get her bed there, trying to convince the necessary people that she was just crazy enough, no more, no less.

The campaign had begun by accident, around the time of her fourteenth birthday. Ronnie had taken to poking her body with a ball-point pen, inoculating herself wherever the skin was softest-crooks of elbows, tops of thighs, backs of knees. The pinpricks began to itch; she scratched. The infection got so bad that she ended up running a high fever, which meant a trip to a hospital emergency room. The attending doctor sent her to Shechter for observation. Once observed, she was sent back to Poolesville. But Ronnie had made her own observations. Shechter was clearly the place to be.

She couldn’t have said why she liked it. After all, it was a program for crazy kids, and her family had fought hard against the assumption that she must be crazy, or confused about right and wrong, perhaps even retarded. The buildings at Poolesville were new and clean, and Ronnie usually preferred new to old. Yet the onetime school turned juvenile detention center was where she wanted to be. Maybe it was the lack of fences, or the rolling farmland that surrounded it. Maybe it was the dormitories of the nearby college, which provided a vision of a life that seemed as glamorous to Ronnie as any television show. From the front lawn, she could watch the college girls-what they wore, what they carried.

But she understood that she could not say she wanted to go to Shechter, quite the opposite; she had to pretend to be going along with the rules and structure of Poolesville, had to deny the evidence of her own made-up craziness.

Patiently, she began to cut herself with any implement she could find, nicking her body with pop-tops and pencils, nibbling herself with her own teeth, and when all else failed, scratching herself raw, until her calves were lined with long red tracks. What could they do? No matter how closely they trimmed her nails, they always grew back. They could cover the tips with Band-Aids, put her hands in restraints at night, but unless they were willing to rip out her nails all the way to the beds and extract her teeth, they could not disarm her.

“You’re smarter than Yossarian,” her doctor said when she finally got her permanent bed at Shechter.

“Who?”

“Catch-22? ‘I am not the bombardier’?” Ronnie shook her head. “It’s not important,” he assured her.

She liked the doctor, as much as she could like anyone who got to tell her what to do, who decided when she was right and when she was wrong. He seemed to be on her side. But she couldn’t be too forthcoming with him because he might turn on her, too. Ronnie had thought lying was something children were forced to do because they lived by others’ rules. She had thought growing up would mean lying less, but it hadn’t worked out that way so far. Yes, Shechter had been pretty good. But she would have been truly crazy if she hadn’t been happy to leave.

Home. She had tried out the word on the new place the day she first saw it. So this was home. It was set up in the usual rowhouse floor plan. Good, there was a dishwasher. One less chore for her. And a microwave, too. She imagined her father bringing it into the house, imagined her mother asking, with equal parts pleasure and irritation: “What truck did that fall off of?” Ronnie hadn’t understood the question when she was younger, but she did now.

Ronnie had climbed the stairs, knowing what layout to expect-a master bedroom across the front, which would get the light, one dark interior room, a small bedroom in the back, and one bathroom for all.

Her room, the dark room in the middle, had a bed, a dresser, a small lamp-and nothing else. She pulled two bills from her back pocket and looked for a place to hide them. It was hard to hide things in an all-but-empty room. She took the clothes she had packed in her overnight bag and placed them in one of the drawers, then hid the money in the folds of a T-shirt. No, her mother might go there. The bed was made with a new spread, white with little raised dots. When she left home, her bed had been covered with a Scooby-Doo spread, which would be pretty stupid now, but Ronnie wasn’t sure she liked the white one. She lifted the thin, bumpy cotton and slid the bills, a ten and a twenty, between the mattress and box spring, as far as her arm could go.

The money had been intended for cab fare and it had started out as two tens and a twenty, old bills almost reproachful in their limpness, as if her parents wanted Ronnie to remember that their money was scrounged from pockets and purses and wallets, not snapped up from an ATM or a bank teller. From the moment she saw the money emerge from the envelope, Ronnie had known she would find a way to pocket it. She would take a bus home or hitch, but she would keep as much of that forty dollars as possible.

Of course, the staff never would have allowed such a thing, so she had gone through the pretense of summoning a cab to the top of the hill, of waving to them all as she climbed in. It was then that the counselor had given her the small gift-wrapped box, the one still in her bag. She had felt grand, a bit like a girl in a movie-perhaps the one about the girl who learned she was a princess-riding down the hill.

Then, as soon as the cab was off the grounds of the hospital and a few blocks down the street, she tapped on the Plexiglas and asked the cabdriver to let her out.

“What?” he barked. He was white but foreign, with a strange accent and an acrid body odor. “You call for ride to Saint Agnes Lane, over by Route 40. You can’t get out here.”

“Why not?”

“Is illegal.”

She was pretty sure he was lying, but she made the mistake of sounding weak: “You have to let me out if I ask?”

“No, is dangerous. I get ticket if I discharge you here.”

“So pull into that 7-Eleven parking lot.”

“No. You call for long ride. You must go or pay.”

She knew from the way his story shifted that he was making this all up. He was a cheater. Ronnie had never been much good at arguing with anyone, but cheaters were the worst.

“Please pull over.”

“You will pay.”

“Pull over.”

With a sigh so forceful it might as well have been a shout, he did just that. The meter said $3.50. Ronnie offered him one of the tens and waited for her change. The man took the bill and put it away.

“You can’t take ten dollars for a three-fifty fare,” she said.

“Extra dollar for call,” he said, pointing to a red light on the meter box.

“That’s still only four-fifty.”

He was ripping her off. Because she was a girl, because she was young. Such encounters had once made Ronnie fierce, with the focused rage of a small dog. But now she was supposed to work toward solutions. Unfortunately, the lessons of the hospital had assumed there was always some nice neutral person who could step in, a doctor or a principal, a teacher or a parent. Use your happy tones, Ronnie. Anger is just a letter away from danger.

Here, in the parking lot at the 7-Eleven, there was no one to sort things out between Ronnie and the cabdriver.

“I came for big fare, not little fare. Plus, you owe me tip.”

She got out of the cab, frightened of her own feelings, frightened by the fix she was in. Now she had only thirty dollars, and thirty dollars might not be enough to take a cab all the way home. She could take a bus, but it would have to be at least two buses, and which two buses? Plus, she needed change for the bus, and no one would give her change unless she bought something, which would mean losing another dollar or two out of the thirty. Aware of the cabdriver’s eyes on her, she walked into the 7-Eleven with her head high, as if this had been her destination all along. Then she hid in the chip aisle until she was sure he was gone.

Back on the street, she knew her only choice was to find a ride. She had never done this before, but her older brothers had. And there had been a girl at Shechter who had bragged about getting rides all the time. “I never had to do anything, either,” the girl, Victoria, had said.

“But how do you keep them from, you know?”

“You’ve got to be picky about who you ride with.” Victoria enjoyed having Ronnie seek her out, ask her advice. No one knew exactly what Ronnie had done, but rumors were rampant at Shechter because she wasn’t required to attend AA or NA. Which, at Shechter, usually meant someone was really nuts, scary nuts. Some people said authoritatively that Ronnie had killed her entire family, despite the fact that her mom visited regularly. Others said Ronnie had been part of a thrill-kill, that her boyfriend had talked her into murdering someone just for fun.

Ronnie liked the idea of being credited with a boyfriend. She also felt a strange, sour pride in the fact that no one ever came close to guessing why she was really there. Anyone who was alive in Baltimore that summer would probably remember the story of the missing baby and how she had been found dead, and then the constant mention of two eleven-year-old girls, two eleven-year-old girls, two eleven-year-old girls, can you believe it, the baby was killed by two eleven-year-old girls. Now she and the event floated free from each other, disconnected. Victoria had no idea who she was or what she had done.

Ronnie persisted, not afraid for once to show her ignorance. “Picky how?”

“Go for guys in ties.”

“Guys in ties?”

“Yeah, and boring cars like your dad drives.”

Ronnie’s father still drove a Coca-Cola truck, and the family car was an old AMC Hornet-at least, that’s what it was when Ronnie went away. But she knew what Victoria meant.

“You want a businessman, like. A guy who will freak if you scream, or say you’re going to tell or go to the police. With a young guy, a guy closer to your age, he’s not scared of getting in trouble, so you got no-what’s the word?”

“What word?”

“That word for when you have control over another person?”

Ronnie shrugged. She had no idea what Victoria was talking about.

“Anyway, don’t go with anyone under thirty. Oh, and don’t stick your thumb out.”

“But I thought that’s what hitchhikers did.”

“It’s not your thumb that gets you the ride,” Victoria said. “Turn your back to the traffic, and walk as if you mean to be walking. But twitch.”

She demonstrated. Victoria was a large, fleshy girl who wore tight jeans. Her bottom did shift a bit as she walked, but it just looked uncomfortable, as if it wished it weren’t packed so tight.

Out on the street, Ronnie turned her back, as Victoria had advised, and walked as if she had a destination. She didn’t try to twitch. There was a golf course to her right, with lots of men playing, even though it was a weekday. Were they rich, or did they call in sick to their jobs? Her dad had been known to go missing from his job, as he put it, but he said it was bad luck to lie about being sick. He said the trick was to come up with a story that couldn’t be checked, a story that couldn’t hurt anyone. He had never told her what those stories were.

She was almost past the golf course when she got the first offer. The boy was cute on first glance, and he drove one of those little Jeep-like cars, the sort of thing Ronnie would have liked for herself, if she ever learned how to drive. But there was something off about his face, the longer she looked at him, and Victoria ’s advice carried the weight of a rule. No, thank you, no, really. I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine.

The next guy was older, behind the wheel of a van with the name of a painting company stenciled on the side, and he was freckled with paint. Not a van, Ronnie knew, although Victoria had not thought to tell her this. Never a van. She felt as if she were trudging along one of the board games she had played as a kid, Candy Land, or the one with the ladders. She had to pick carefully if she was going to get home with her thirty dollars.

The third one was just right, everything Victoria said. A tie and a four-door black car, not new, but not old. His face was shiny and red, although the interior of his car felt cool through the window he lowered to talk to Ronnie.

“You need a ride?”

“Well-I was just going up to the bus stop.”

“How far are you going?”

“Pretty far,” Ronnie admitted. “ Saint Agnes Lane, over near Route 40.”

“Outside the Beltway?”

“No, in. Near-” What was it near? It wasn’t just that her parents had moved, it was that Ronnie was no longer sure what milestones had survived along the Route 40 corridor. Arby’s? High’s Dairy Shop? The Crab King? “Do you know that sign, the one that says you’re entering Baltimore City?”

“So it’s on the city-county line?”

“Just over, in the county.” Her mother had been so proud about crossing that line.

“That’s not so far, if you know the right shortcuts. Hop in.”

She did, arranging her black nylon overnight bag so it filled her lap.

“You can put that in the back.”

“I’m okay.”

“Or in the trunk.”

“I’m okay.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

It was only once they were under way that Ronnie saw the problem she hadn’t anticipated: she had no idea how to answer the man’s questions, innocuous as they were. School? She had actually finished in January, because of summer school credits, but where was her diploma from? She couldn’t say she had graduated from Shechter Unit. Plus, if she said she was finished, she couldn’t say she was fourteen later, which Victoria said was the deal-breaker for most guys, being fourteen.

“I go to… Towson,” she said, hoping it was the name of a high school.

“Yeah? My cousin goes there.” He said a name, but of course she didn’t know it. He named more names. She just kept shaking her head and shrugging her shoulders. Maybe it was good for him to think she was stupid and didn’t know anyone at high school.

“How is it,” he said at last, “that you go to Towson High, but your parents live over in Southwest Baltimore?”

She thought of the answer her doctor had told her she could use, when asked about her past. “It’s really complicated.”

“Oh, yeah, I know how that works. Use a fake address to get into a better school. I went to Calvert Hall myself.” He seemed pleased with himself, but it meant nothing to Ronnie.

They had been driving west-she could tell by the sun-and the landscape of houses had been shifting constantly, from very rich to very poor. They had passed a hospital, and the racetrack. She was keeping tabs because you never knew, Victoria said, where you might get put out. Now it looked like the neighborhood where Ronnie had grown up, except everyone on the street was black.

The driver-he had said his name was Bill-took several quick turns and they ended up on a narrow road along a stream. The car slowed, and Ronnie made sure she was holding the door handle, but there was no shoulder and he kept going. He passed through a neighborhood where all the houses were white, and Ronnie realized she knew it, that she was close to home. The houses began to peter out, and they were in a dense corridor of trees that were just beginning to bud. Somehow, the stream was now on the left side. When had they crossed it? Ronnie had not noticed a bridge. And then there was a barrier, a big sign saying the road was closed until further notice.

“Well, I’ll be,” her driver said. “I forgot they closed this off.”

But he didn’t try to turn around, just put the car in park and reached across her to the glove compartment, opening it and taking out a small bottle of clear liquid. If it had not been for the black bag on her lap, he would have rubbed his arm against Ronnie’s breasts. Instead, he had to settle for brushing against nylon.

“This is Leakin Park,” she said. “My house is just on the other side of these hills.”

“Right. But we’ll have to backtrack, go the long way around via Forest Park.”

“Why is the road closed?”

His hand was in his lap, the tip of his tongue protruded between his lips, but he was otherwise the same shiny-faced man who had picked her up, the man named Bill who had gone to Calvert Hall, whose cousin had gone to Towson High.

“They’re building some kind of walkway. They call it a nature trail, but Jungle Land would be more like it. Or Baltimore Safari. Walk through Leakin Park, see if you come out alive. They could make one of those reality TV shows about it.”

“Why is it unsafe?” Ronnie had played along the edges of Leakin Park when she was as little as seven, and ventured farther and farther inside as she got older. Of course, she didn’t have permission, but she had never felt scared there.

“Because that’s a bad neighborhood up on that hill.”

“Oh. I thought it was because-well, I heard something really bad happened here once.”

“Like a ghost story? You want to tell me a ghost story, honey? Come sit on my lap and tell me your story. Tell Uncle Bill your story.”

She hugged her bag tighter to her chest.

“Show me your titties, Alice.” For that was the name she had given him, when he asked about high school. Alice Manning. Alice Manning, Alice Manning, Alice Manning. It was the first time Ronnie had to make up a name for herself, and she automatically said, Alice Manning.

“Show me your titties, and I’ll take you the rest of the way home. Just pull up your shirt, show me those pretty little things. I won’t touch ’em. I promise I won’t touch ’em.”

“I’m fourteen,” she said.

“Oh, I don’t think so. You walk like you’ve been fucked a time or two. You’ve been a bad girl, haven’t you? Tell Uncle Bill. Tell Uncle Bill what you let the boys do to you.”

His hand was beginning to move in his lap, but his voice was still dreamy and pleasant.

“You’re a bad, bad girl,” he crooned. “I know all about you.”

“I’m not.”

Her voice was shrill and hard, the angriest voice she had allowed herself in quite some time. She tried to rein it in. “But I know someone who was-who is. I’ll tell you what she did.”

“Tell Uncle Bill, baby. Tell Uncle Bill.”

“There were two little girls-”

“Oh, that’s a good story, Alice.”

“And they found a baby. A baby whose mother didn’t love her, who left her all alone on the front porch. They took her away from her mother and they made a…safe place for her. But the baby was sick, all along, she was going to die anyway. And the girls-well, one of the girls-got scared and said they had to take her back. But the other girl said no, that they couldn’t, that they had to kill the baby because no one would believe them anyway.”

His hand had stopped moving.

“It really happened,” Ronnie said. “Right here, seven years ago. I know the girls who did it. They went to my school.”

“I thought you went to Towson.”

“My school before,” Ronnie said, staring him straight in the eye. “Middle school.”

The man’s face was now gray-white instead of red, although still quite sweaty. He wiped his hand on his pants leg, turned the key in the ignition, and said to Ronnie: “Tell me again where you live.”

And so she had arrived home on the hottest March day in history, thirty dollars richer, and she hadn’t had to do a thing. She had sat on her bed, thinking about her choices. She could have gone downstairs and seen what was in the refrigerator. She could have turned on the television in her parents’ room, flopped across the bed on her stomach. She could have taken a walk, headed down the street to the convenience store. The store stood where her old street and her new street met, a hinge between the old life and the new.

Instead, she had decided to take the gift-wrapped box from her bag and open it. The square box had a sticker on it: Port Discovery: The Kids’ Museum. Ronnie didn’t remember such a place from when she was a kid. Back then, all the museums had been boring adult ones, full of vases.

The box yielded, from layers and layers of spun cotton, a collection of key rings, all with little toys attached. A tiny replica of the old Operation game, the board from Life, the bald man with magnetic hair to be arranged and rearranged. The final ring held a miniature Etch-a-Sketch. The counselor had painstakingly written on its tiny surface: “Good luck, Ronnie.”

She had also enclosed a note: “I wasn’t sure which one you’d like best, so I got you all of them.” Nice, she was nice. But why a key ring? It seemed a weird gift. And then Ronnie had understood. For the first time in seven years, she would have keys. She would open her own doors, and close them behind her.

It was April now, and that Etch-a-Sketch, long wiped clean, was in her hand, clenched so her keys-just two, to the front door lock and the dead bolt-dug into her palms. She was in the old block, walking past the Mannings’ house. She could not risk slowing down, or even staring openly. It was early, anyway, and Helen often slept until noon on Saturdays. But if their paths did cross, if she saw Ronnie and said hello, then Ronnie could ask, as if it had just occurred to her, as if she had not thought about it almost every day for the last seven years: Do you remember the honeysuckle?

She knew Helen would.

7.

Wagner’s Tavern had become the county homicide detectives’ bar of choice by way of becoming a police scene. An SUV crammed with five screaming teenagers took the curve outside the bar at 100 miles per hour one night before Christmas. At least, that was the speed estimate after the fact, when traffic investigators began to crawl around the three steaming pieces of the bright-red Isuzu Rodeo that had come to rest inside Wagner’s, a few feet short of the pool table. The top speed could have been 90 or 95, but 100 made for a nice round number, and the television reporters always used the biggest numbers they could get away with, whether it was speed or snowfall.

“Except in the case of windchill,” said Lenhardt, interrupting his own story. “Then they use the lowest number. You know-the temperature will be thirty-seven degrees today, but it will feel like twenty below! Tune back in at five and it may be thirty below! Our twenty-four-hour Doppler Radar Storm Center Hoo-Haw guarantees the most dire weather forecast in Baltimore, or your money back.”

Lenhardt had happened to be on his way home the night of the crash when he saw patrol cars and uniforms swarming. The human toll was miraculously light-the only Shock Trauma transports were two of the kids in the car, and as Lenhardt said later in his Lenhardt way, “Hard to get choked up about that.” The redheaded barmaid had a broken leg, and a couple of people caught broken glass, some of it flung from the ornaments on the demolished Christmas tree, which was the first thing the Isuzu hit after coming through the wall.

But the bar had lived to tell the tale, and the only visible change was the guardrail on the curve. On late nights, Lenhardt could be found at the curve of the reconstituted bar, or sitting at a plastic-covered table, buying rounds for his detectives.

“So that’s why you come here.” It was Nancy ’s first time at Wagner’s, because she usually said no and hurried home to Andy. But she needed to be one of the guys tonight, even at the risk of pissing Andy off.

“What?” Lenhardt said, playing dumb, no small play for him. “You trying to imply something about my choice of drinking establishments?”

“You picked this as your hangout because you figure it can’t happen again. Which is really superstitious.”

“I’d call it playing the odds.”

“Only the odds haven’t changed because the curve hasn’t changed.”

“Huh?” Infante said, truly lost. But Lenhardt grinned knowingly.

“It’s not like there’s a standard probability for a bar getting hit by a car,” Nancy said. “A bar on this kind of curve is going to get hit more often than a bar that’s not on the curve, guardrail or no.”

“Standard probability.” The sergeant turned to the other detective. “Listen to that, Infante. We’re wasting our time here. Let’s go to Atlantic City, let Miss Nancy demonstrate her knowledge of standard probability at the blackjack tables.”

“So why do you come here?” Nancy was already bored with the topic, but she had to stick to her guns, show Lenhardt she had the stamina to stay with an argument.

“I come here because the beer is cheap, they’ll open the kitchen for a public servant working late, and it’s on the way home. Don’t overanalyze things, Nancy. How many times I gotta tell you that?”

Infante laughed in his hand, and Nancy could feel a blush spreading across her face like a stain. Sometimes she hated being so fair, so blond.

Lenhardt took pity on her. “You got your own stuff to work on, Infante.”

She bit into a popper, the closest thing to a vegetable she had eaten in three days. “Hey, how come he’s Infante and I’m always Nancy, or Miss Nancy?”

“Fer Chri-” But Lenhardt wouldn’t even take the lord’s name in front of Nancy, so he ended up saying nothing more than “Fer cry.” Most times he didn’t even get halfway into the word, but the day had taken its toll.

“You’re not going to get all feminist on me, are you?” Lenhardt asked now. “I mean, he”-he stopped himself again-“heck, you want me to call you Porter, I’ll call you Porter. I’ll even try to call you that mouthful of consonants you were born with-Padrewski, Portrotsky. But cra”-another deft catch-“c’mon, it’s just, it’s just a way of talking, Nancy. I mean Potter. I mean Porterchinski.”

“Potrcurzski. That’s okay, sergeant. I got a special name for you, too.”

“Yeah? What?”

“The Double-L.”

“How you get a double l out of Harold Lenhardt?”

“It’s not for Lenhardt.” Nancy grinned. “For Living Legend. Because that’s what everyone tells me I’m working for. My uncles, Andy-they remind me at least once a week that my sergeant is a genuine goddamn livin’ legend.”

She thought this would make him laugh, but Lenhardt just shook his head. “There are no living legends, Nancy. Only dead ones.”

They had cleared the New York Fried Chicken case that evening. Now it was the prosecutor’s to lose. It had taken twelve hours of interviews with four different kids, but when the day was done, they had booked all four, three on homicide, one on a lesser charge, because that was the deal he had struck. In some ways, Nancy thought the deal-maker the finkiest of the four, but wasn’t that the way? They were always the ones who turned.

Lenhardt misread her mournful expression, seemed to think she was feeling sorry for herself. “You’ll be a good murder police.”

Good, but not great, Nancy thought, then wondered why she was so defensive. No one had criticized her over the past four days, or suggested she was inadequate in any way. She had been praised for some of her work. Yet she felt rebuked, stupid, exposed. A kid had seen through her. A jumpy killer, with the impulse control of a mouse on Ritalin, had gotten to her.

Her Nokia cell phone chirped. Andy typed his good night:

LONG DAY. GOING TO BED.

Even his text message sounded angry. Beneath the table, Nancy typed back:

SUIT YOURSELF.

Then she wanted to take it back, but she couldn’t.

They had been together since high school, one way or another, but it was only lately they had fallen into the habit of sniping at each other. Her mother said it would pass, and her mother had a thirty-five-year marriage on which to stake her expertise. But what did her mother know about twelve-hour days that left you feeling at once victorious and ashamed? You couldn’t go straight home after a day like that. If anyone could understand, it should be Andy, who had been a police and was now working for the feds while attending law school at night.

“I feel like we know what happened,” Nancy said, “but not why. It was supposed to be a robbery, with a gun.”

“Why isn’t our problem,” Lenhardt said. “Forget about it.”

She couldn’t. “According to the inside kid they were going to wear masks, put the manager and their accomplice in the freezer to throw detectives off. The gun was supposed to be for show, to get the money.”

The inside kid, the coworker, had been almost grateful to be found. After all, he knew better than anyone the potential vindictiveness of his buddies, all former employees at New York Fried Chicken. The inside kid had pled to a lesser charge of manslaughter, but his main crime in Nancy’s opinion was being dumb enough to think that if you unlock the door at a Route 40 chicken shack and admit three unmasked guys with a gun, they’re going to be content to take the money and depart, doffing their caps as they go. Doffing their caps was another Lenhardtism, of course: “Tally-ho, good day, thank you for these tens and twenties, and may I have some of the Cajun extra-crispy to go? It ain’t Cary Grant on the Riviera, Nancy. If it were, robbery would be working it. People don’t kill people sometimes, we’re out of work.”

“Yeah, I know,” Nancy said. She suspected that Lenhardt wanted to let it go, put the day behind him, but she couldn’t. She had to learn. It had been so easy to catch them, so hard to break them down. They had an insolence that left her breathless. Her Polish grandfather had escaped from Europe with nothing but the clothes on his back, survived the sinking of an ocean liner, and refused the easy names pressed on him when he arrived at the Port of Baltimore in 1916. Josef Potrcurzski had carried his own knife, and later a gun, guarding his block like a sheriff in the Old West. Yet even he would have been terrified by this trio.

“The killing was the point,” Lenhardt said. “More than the money, which would have lasted maybe forty-eight hours, and that’s if they got some financial planner from Merrill Lynch to help them invest it. They didn’t kill someone in a robbery. They had a robbery so they could kill someone.”

“So why bring a gun,” Nancy said, “and use one of the kitchen knives?”

Lenhardt pressed his palms into his eyes and rubbed, hard, the way the redheaded barmaid had twisted Nancy ’s limed-up margarita glass when Nancy asked for extra salt.

“I don’t know, Miss Nancy. I just don’t know. You found the casing in the parking lot. Maybe the kid with the gun fired it and was scared by the noise. Maybe they shot and missed, what with the vic swinging that knife around, assuming they were telling the truth about that. Poor bastard died defending the honor of New York Fried Chicken.”

“Okay, so they wanted to kill someone. But why someone they’d be connected to so easily?”

“They’re not thinking this through, Nancy. They don’t know from standard probability.”

“Seriously.”

“Maybe they killed him because he was their boss once. Because he told them to clean out the fryer, and put those napkins out, and make sure the tables are wiped down. Because he enforced the hair net rule. They killed him-” Lenhardt paused. He knew how to tell a story, how to get his audience hanging on his every word. “Because he cared, because he thought it mattered that the New York Fried Chicken on Route 40 had clean bathrooms and fresh oil and low absenteeism. The fast-food true believer met the West Side Existentialist Club, and the existentialists won.”

Lenhardt rolled his eyes-Did I say that?-and Infante laughed, repeating existentialist in a slightly drunken slur, as if it were funny, maybe even a little dirty.

“You know, five miles east, and it’s not even a county case,” Infante said. “I don’t think it’s where the crime occurs that should establish jurisdiction. I think it’s where the mope lives. Their bum, their tax dollars, their detectives.”

“Shit, you play by those rules, the only thing we’re catching is domestics in Dundalk. Besides, we represent the victims, remember? We work for the citizens of Baltimore County.”

Lenhardt’s mood had been rising and falling since they arrived at Wagner’s. He always plunged after the initial high of getting the work done. “Homicide hypoglycemia,” he called it. Nancy experienced the same thing, if to a lesser degree. It felt good to get the clearance, but the process exacted a price. She found that she listened to the confessions the way she watched a scary movie, basically wishing it all undone, urging the actors to do the things that would make the movie end in five uneventful minutes. Don’t open that door. Don’t confide in that man. Don’t pick up that phone.

“Cheer up, Sarge,” Infante said. “We won this round.”

“ Campbell died last week,” Lenhardt said.

“ Campbell?” Nancy asked, even as Infante nodded.

“H. Grayson Campbell. H. Grayson Campbell the Third, or maybe it was the Fourth. Died in a nursing home. Last time I stopped to talk to him, he thought I was his stepson. Guy’s got no control of his bowels or his bladder or his brain, he’s facing down death-and he still won’t tell me where she is.”

“Do I know Campbell?” Nancy asked. The name was familiar. Maybe she had seen the file on Lenhardt’s desk. He pulled old files all the time. The sergeant never stopped learning, never stopped studying. And she never stopped watching him.

“Just a rich guy who had a habit of bouncing his wife off the walls every now and then, even after they split up. One night, she doesn’t bounce back.”

“You allege,” Infante said, aping a defense lawyer’s prissy voice.

“Yeah, I allege. Her kids from her first marriage allege. Her family alleges. We’re all alligators, heaping our suspicions on this poor, misunderstood citizen because his ex-wife happened to go over there to talk about her Visa bill, and she’s never seen again, dead or alive. Now that the bastard is dead, I can say it out loud, say it to the world, and it doesn’t do a damn thing. It was her husband. And he left this planet without telling me where he left her.”

“Where do you think he put the body?” Nancy asked.

“I don’t know. Where do county guys go to dump their bodies? If he was a city mutt, I’d check Leakin Park. But he ain’t no city mutt, and even after ten years out here, I never have figured out where county guys dump their bodies. Too much acreage.”

Nancy looked down at her plate, an assortment of deep-fried things-mushrooms, zucchini, the cheese-filled poppers. She needed to go back on her diet. She hadn’t tried, not with a case working, which meant life was all carryout. She calculated calories and carbs, pondered buying a stationary bike. She thought about anything and everything to block out the memories that surged whenever anyone said “ Leakin Park.”

Lenhardt looked in his lap and Nancy understood that his beeper must have gone off.

“Wife time,” Infante said, laughing.

“Hey, at least Nancy and I are still on our first spouses,” he said, getting up and going to the phone, leaving Infante and Nancy alone.

An awkward silence fell. Although the two had spent plenty of time alone together, they seldom socialized. “I had a case once,” Infante said, “where I thought the guy put his wife in a wood-chipper. Guy was really big on gardening. I’ve never seen so much mulch. Everything was mulched.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Nancy said, with an inappropriate heat.

“What?”

“I mean, if there was a wood-chipper, you could check it for blood. You can’t mulch a person without a trace, much less scour all the trace evidence out of a wood-chipper.”

Infante looked at her as if to say: “The fuck did I do?” Nancy couldn’t tell him, because he hadn’t done anything. But picking on Infante would somehow even up the day, make up for what happened when the last of the quartet was being maneuvered into handcuffs for transport to the county jail.

This was the one who had done it, the one who had taken the knife and driven it into the victim again and again and again. He was slight, weighed less than Nancy. But there was something menacing in the very fineness of his bones, as if a bigger boy had been boiled down until all that remained was this concentrated bit of rage and bile.

He had bugged Lenhardt, too, although he didn’t realize it. That was a mistake, not knowing when Lenhardt was mad at you.

“We got you, you know?” Lenhardt couldn’t help telling the little one after he signed on the dotted line. “Your friends gave you up. They told us plenty, by the way. Your buddies, your pals, your confederates.”

Confederates-another Lenhardtism. He had told Nancy he used it for the very associations it raised. Confederate-Confederacy-Civil War-slavery. For the young black men of Baltimore, the wrongs done to their ancestors brought them nothing but shame. To have been a slave was to have been weak. To be descended from slaves was just as bad. But only Lenhardt would think it through this way.

For a fleeting second, the young man had looked surprised, then his face closed up again. Nancy guessed his emotions had flowed much the same way at the chicken place. He had been caught off guard by his former boss’s bravery-and punished him for it. He had chased the night manager from the kitchen to the parking lot, increasingly desperate, worried not about being caught, but about being disgraced by the other boy’s futile courage. He had killed him to show the others the price of such valor.

Now he lunged at Nancy, grabbing a handful of her ass.

“Nice,” he said, “for a white girl.”

Lenhardt had punched him so hard in the stomach that the kid had doubled over and fallen to his knees. The sergeant smiled at Nancy over the boy’s prostrate body, happy for the opportunity, inviting her to land a kick or a punch if she wanted. When she passed, he gave her a curious look, then helped himself, distributing the punishment he thought fair. The kid had to lie there and take it.

He had touched a cop. Nancy couldn’t help feeling that she had failed, that a better cop wouldn’t have been grabbed in the first place. And Lenhardt had let her mistake slide because he was so happy for a chance to smack that kid before the day was over.

“The wood-chipper-” Nancy began again, and she knew she was going to off-load to Infante the anger she had caught from the kid. Life was just a long game of emotional tag, one bad mood passing from person to person. But before she could finish, her Nokia chirped and the text message scrolled by in plain view.

I’M HOME

The words seemed to shiver on the screen, but that was probably just some disturbance in the cell. The Kenwood Homecoming Queen again. Why didn’t she just get her own public access channel on Baltimore County cable, keep her friends up-to-date with a 24/7 crawl.

“Your hubby?” Infante asked.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “He’s pissed at me. Besides, I already know where he is.”

The message stared insistently back at her. Was it for her? No way. She wouldn’t even try to make a connection if it weren’t for Lenhardt, the sheer coincidence of tonight’s conversation: If he was a city mutt, I’d know to check Leakin Park .

Leakin Park. Even a near homonym, such as Lincoln or leaking, could make her jump. Leakin Park. The name always brought back the little lean-to in the woods, or the silhouette of her classmate from the academy, Cyrus Hickory, standing in the door. He told her to stay back, but Nancy had to prove she could do whatever he did, so she crossed the stream, walked up to the falling-down house-

No. Over the past seven years, Nancy had learned she could choose, that she had the power not to cross the threshold if she wasn’t up to seeing what was on the other side. So tonight, she did what she didn’t do then. She backed away, so she was moving away from the little house in the woods, splashing backward through the polluted stream, edging up the hill, her gloved hands empty, blessedly empty.

Lenhardt came back to the table, threw his money down, and waved off the bills that Nancy and Infante tried to add. “I’m one drink away from a divorce,” he said. “Marcia is more lenient than.08, but not by much. You should go home, too, Nancy.”

“What about me?” Infante asked.

“Not even Dr. Joyce Brothers herself could save your relationships, Kevin.”

“True enough,” the detective said amiably, more amused than anyone at the string of Mrs. Infantes that had come and gone in the last twenty years. He got up and headed to the bar. The barmaid had a trace of a limp, but she was still redheaded and still pretty, in that hard, shellacked-hair way of a county barmaid.

Out of nowhere, Lenhardt asked: “You ever think about a baby?”

“Baby?” He knows, she thought. All this time, he’s known and he’s never asked. Of course he would know. Cops gossip like Polish grandmothers. You know the background on Porter, right? The Kolchaks’ niece? A shame, but she brought it on herself. You’d think she’da known better, with her background.

“Having a baby. You think about it?”

“Oh.” She was so relieved that she didn’t mind Lenhardt getting personal with her. “Doesn’t everybody? But Andy has one semester of law school left, and I just made Homicide.”

“Babies are more important than any of that.”

“Yeah. How many kids you got?”

“Three,” Lenhardt said. “That I know of.” He popped his eyes and let his mouth gape, but he was too tired to pull off his own shtick.

“Be good,” he said abruptly and ambled off.

Be good? Where had that come from? But she took his advice, took it across the board. Drove straight home, woke up her sleeping husband, and made love to him, which he assumed was her way of apologizing, and maybe it was, although she didn’t think she had anything to apologize for. Life was so short, and she didn’t want to be at odds with the person who knew her best. The person who loved her before, the person who loved her after, the person who swore he would love her always.

Andy went back to sleep, but Nancy never did, not that night. She stared at the ceiling, adding seven to eleven, then subtracting it.

The call had to be a wrong number.

Thursday, April 16
8.

The first child disappeared from the Rite Aid at Ingleside Shopping Center. She was strapped into a cart on aisle 11-Baby Needs, Foot Care, Feminine Hygiene-when her mother, Mary Jo Herndon, remembered a new kind of hair gel she had seen advertised just that morning. The gel promised to get rid of the frizz while adding shine. She saw herself with straight, glossy hair, tossing it around as she laughed with some man. Maybe Bobby, maybe not. The actual man was less important than the shiny banner of hair, flying around the way it did in commercials, warm as sunlight on her shoulders.

Hair care was one aisle over, but there was a woman between Mary Jo and the end of the aisle, a big-butted woman who was studying the Dr. Scholl’s products with fierce concentration, her basket placed at an angle that made it impossible for another cart to get by. And Mary Jo didn’t want to ask her to move because there was something obstinate in that big behind, the sense of a woman spoiling for a fight. It was easier to leave the cart, step around the woman, and jog to the hair care aisle. After all, she was just going to grab the gel and then go to the cash register. The trip was already out of control. Mary Jo had come for toilet paper and charcoal, and now her cart was almost full.

Rite Aid didn’t carry the brand she remembered from the commercial, but it had a dizzying array of alternatives and Mary Jo paused to consider her options. There was a whole line of products in sleek lavender bottles, but the manufacturer called it a system, suggesting it was all-or-nothing. Part of her mind knew this was a gyp, a bluff. There was no way you had to buy the whole set to get the benefits of the gel.

But Mary Jo also believed an expensive purchase could be transforming. The product might not be any better, but choosing to pay extra was a way of saying you deserved a little luxury in this world and that mind-set could make it so. Didn’t she deserve the best, or at least something better? That’s what everyone said: You deserve better. Of course, her friends and family were talking about Bobby and her living situation, but there was no product on the earth that could fix Bobby. She grabbed a bottle of the lavender stuff and trotted back to aisle 11.

Aisle 11 was empty. No Jordan, no cart, no big-butted woman staring down at the Dr. Scholl’s products. Mary Jo must have gone the wrong way, turned right when she should have turned left. No problem. She retraced her steps, heading to aisle 9.

That was empty, too.

The first empty aisle had made her nervous, but it had been a safe, contained nervousness, for she assumed she had taken a wrong turn, that Jordan was waiting for her around the next corner. Mary Jo had felt the way she did on the long, cranking climb of the roller coaster at Adventure World-scared for the sake of it, yet secure, knowing the climb was just part of the suspense, that the fine print on the ticket was just for show.

When she reached the second aisle, she no longer knew what was happening or how it would end, and then all bets were off, all promises voided. She started trotting the long, diagonal corridor that bisected the store, shouting out Jordan ’s name and trying to imagine the worst. Because if she could imagine a thing, it couldn’t happen.

A child cried, sharp and scared, and Mary Jo ran toward the sound with gratitude and relief. But the child she found on aisle 3 was a boy, his face red from where a hand had just lashed out, his mother glaring at Mary Jo, ready to defend herself. Mary Jo left them, thinking: You are so lucky to have a child to slap. No, that wasn’t quite right. She promised God she would never slap Jordan again, never raise a hand to her in any way if he would just give her back. She didn’t, not often, and she knew it was wrong. Never again, she promised. Never again. You hear me, God?

Other promises followed as she ran a serpentine path through the store, up and down the aisles, calling Jordan ’s name at intervals. She would be a better mother overall, patient and kind, not even yelling. She would be nicer to her sister, although Mimi did have a way of lording over her, making Mary Jo feel like a fuck-up because Bobby had proved to be so unreliable. What else? Oh God, she would be so perfect in every way if Jordan turned up.

“Ma’am. Ma’am.” The pharmacist’s voice was insistent, chiding, a voice of authority. He was going to tell her to stop shouting, stop running. Who was he to say she couldn’t yell, when her baby was missing? “Ma’am-please, ma’am.”

“I’m looking for my little girl, my Jordan. She’s three? Has long curly hair like mine, only kinkier and darker?” She didn’t understand why everything was coming out like a question, as if she needed this strange man to confirm what she was saying. “She was wearing-she was wearing-”

Oh, God, what was she wearing? A dress. Jordan was going through this stubborn phase where she insisted on wearing dresses every day. Green? Blue? A hand-me-down from Mimi’s three girls, something with smocking or embroidery at the top. In the car, Jordan had pulled the top off her Sippee Cup, leaving a dark red stain on the front. Mary Jo had screamed at her because Jordan knew better, she had taken the cup apart to be contrary. But Mary Jo wouldn’t do that, never again. Stains came out if you treated them right. Stains weren’t important.

“Ma’am.” The pharmacist grabbed Mary Jo’s arm and pulled her down a corridor leading to a rest room. There was her cart, with all her things-the toothpaste and the toilet paper and the potato chips and the charcoal and the two plastic lawn chairs in case they cooked out tonight, if Bobby stopped by for dinner. And there was Jordan in the booster seat. Her dress was blue. Right, she knew that. Her daughter’s dress was blue.

Jordan looked scared, and Mary Jo, who could not see her own face, didn’t realize her expression was not much different from when the Sippee Cup had come apart in the car. She grabbed the girl from the cart and covered her with kisses, asking what had happened, demanding to know who had moved the cart, but giving Jordan no chance to answer. She started sobbing, thinking of all the possible bad endings. Only then did Jordan begin to cry and babble. But her three-year-old vocabulary was not up to the task of telling her story.

“Did you see anyone?” Mary Jo asked the pharmacist. “Who would have pushed my cart here? Was she in the way? Who would do a thing like that? What kind of store is this?”

In her mind, she was seeing some employee push the cart aside because it was blocking the aisle. She would sue, she would raise a fuss. What kind of person pushed a cart with a baby into this little corridor by the bathrooms?

The pharmacist shrugged. At dinner that night, he would tell his wife the story, putting all the blame on Mary Jo. His own children were grown. He could afford to be smug, all the near misses his family had known over the years long forgotten.

As for Mary Jo, she never told the story to anyone-not to Mimi, who would have found a way to blame her, or Bobby, who was in a sour mood when he finally dropped by that evening, long after Jordan had gone to bed. He brought a few dollars, but when Mary Jo asked when she was going to start getting a check regular, now that he was working, he said he’d quit if she tried to garnish his wages, that a man couldn’t get ahead in this world if women were always going to be at them. She said he wasn’t much of a man if he couldn’t support his daughter.

It was a familiar argument from start to finish. Bobby slammed out, leaving her to clean up after their cookout. Bobby was always careful to get a meal before he let a fight begin. Mary Jo went to bed alone. He hadn’t even noticed her hair, which she had washed and styled with the new gel. If he had commented on her hair, she might have told him the story of what happened in Rite Aid. Or not. Bobby might have used it against her, and even Mimi would have found a way to blame Mary Jo.

It would be two months before the next child disappeared.

Monday, June 22
9.

Summer finally began. It began over and over again. It began in mid-May, with a disturbingly early heat wave. It began again on Memorial Day, when the private swim clubs opened for business, even though the heat wave had receded and the weather had reverted to the cold and dreary days of April. It began with each last day of school, district by district, with the city of Baltimore always the last to release its children. It began with the first Code Red day, an index of air, not terror, issued when the heat held the smog too close to the city. It began every Friday about 4 P.M., when the local radio stations reported that the back-ups at the toll plazas for the Bay Bridge were now three miles, four miles, five miles long. It began when the fireflies appeared and a new generation of children tested the folklore that the insects could not fly if one walked with them balanced on a fingertip.

A new summer ritual was also under way that year-the disappearance of children, little girls. They went missing from parks and stores, from yards and porches. But no one noticed, because the girls reappeared minutes later, before their absence had been logged. Even the girls themselves did not seem to recognize the extraordinary thing that had happened to them. Even if they had, they couldn’t have told anyone, for they were toddlers, too young to speak, much less compare notes.

By the time the vernal equinox actually arrived, summer already seemed careworn and used. This happened to be the day that Nancy put on her best suit and went to the courthouse, perhaps the ugliest public building in all of Baltimore County, no small distinction. There, she testified before the grand jury, which needed little encouragement to hand up capital murder indictments against three of the four boys in the New York Fried Chicken killing. The fourth would be tried on robbery and manslaughter charges, which was the deal he had cut for himself. He chose to risk the near-sure death sentence of being a witness, to the guaranteed death sentence given to anyone convicted of a capital crime in Baltimore County.

Duty done, Nancy and Infante met their sergeant at the Italian place on Washington, the chain restaurant that she liked so much. Lenhardt always insisted on treating, claiming the county would pick up the tab, but Nancy suspected these lunches came out of his pocket.

“She going for death?” Infante asked Lenhardt, the she in question being the Baltimore County prosecutor.

“She always does,” Lenhardt said, slathering a bread stick with the restaurant’s trademark tapenade. Nancy was pretending to enjoy a small house salad.

“Good,” Infante said.

“But the victim’s mother might not want it,” Nancy said. She was remembering the woman she had met back in April, a woman whose life had tested her faith yet never weakened it. The walls of the woman’s rowhouse had featured a riotous competition between God’s only son and her only son, with Jesus edging out Franklin Morris. “She’s Christian.”

“So?” Infante said. “Aren’t we all?”

“I mean a real one. Very devout. And you know the state’s attorney won’t go for the death penalty if the relatives don’t want it.”

“Christian?” Lenhardt pretended to be indignant. “Well, eye for an eye is the oldest Christian rule of all.”

“I guess she’s more New Testament, turn the other cheek, like.”

“The New Testament,” Lenhardt said, wagging his breadstick, “is the New Coke of religion. They need to throw that sucker out and go back to the original recipe.”

Nancy gasped so hard, trying not to laugh, that she almost swallowed a cherry tomato from her salad. She was no more religious than the average lapsed Catholic, but it was not a subject about which she could joke. She felt too guilty, being AWOL from St. Casimir’s all these years.

“Anyway, you let that nice Christian lady sit through a little testimony, see a few crime scene photos, and she’ll be ready to give those guys the injection her own self.”

Infante nodded sagely. It was one of his few moves that got under Nancy ’s skin, that wise nod, as if there were things that only he and Lenhardt could understand.

Lenhardt was on a roll, the topic of religion having struck his fancy for some reason. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. And that’s the New Testament, by the way.”

Nancy didn’t know the Bible that well, but she was determined to argue the point: “Is mine. His, not ours. So isn’t God saying we’re not supposed to be in the vengeance business?”

“He’s saying we do it for him, so we better do it right.” But Lenhardt was guessing at the meaning, too. Not a one of them at the table-two Catholics and a Lutheran-at least she thought Lenhardt was a Lutheran-had the credentials to play even half-assed theologians.

“I’ll tell you what I know about revenge,” Infante piped up. He pronounced the word REE-venge, as if it were an act of repetition, not reaction. “It feels good. That’s why God wants it for himself. He knows how much fun it is.”

“I feel a reminiscence coming on,” Lenhardt said. “Wife number one or two?”

“Two.”

“Didn’t you cheat on Two?” Nancy asked, knowing he had.

“Yeah, but I felt bad about it. You know, adultery isn’t what kills a marriage, it’s just-”

“A symptom,” Nancy said, winning a big laugh from Lenhardt, which made her feel good. Infante’s marital history and the accompanying litany of excuses were well known to them.

“Fuck you,” he said, but without bite. This, too, was part of the litany, the beginning of Infante’s marital beatitudes. “Yes, I slipped up, and she caught me, but I wanted to get back with her so bad, I was willing to do anything. Only she didn’t want me anymore. She wanted my house and my furniture, though. And all our money, not that there was so much of it, but her lawyer told her to drain every penny out of our joint accounts. The one thing she didn’t get from me was my key.”

“Really?” Nancy had been working on raising one eyebrow-she thought it was an expression that might have its uses in interrogations-and she tried it now. She caught a glimpse of her face in the metal napkin holder and the effect was far from what she intended. Even allowing for the distortion of the napkin holder, she looked silly, like a cartoon character trying to be menacing. “Calculating as she was, and she didn’t get the key from you, or change the locks?”

“Well”-Infante’s grin belied the hangdog dip of his head-“maybe I had a copy made one day, for emergencies, and she forgot about that. At any rate, one night when she was out, I let myself in.”

“To what purpose?” Lenhardt asked.

“That was the funny thing. I didn’t really have a plan when I went in. It was one A.M.-”

“Was this an alcohol-related crime, Mr. Infante?” Lenhardt pulled out his pad, pretended to take notes.

Again, his grin confessed all. “So I’m there, in my old living room, and I can already see how she’s, like, eliminating me from our life. I had this picture of a boat, kind of a painting, and I just really liked it. It’s not over the mantel, so she’s put it away somewhere. She doesn’t want it, but she won’t let me have it. That’s what she was like. The cat comes in and sniffs at my ankles and my feet, and I start thinking about what she loved most in the world-”

“Not the cat.” Nancy was remembering a famous bit of Baltimore lore about a lobbyist who had put his ex’s cat in the microwave.

“No. What kind of pervert do you think I am? But I look at the cat, twisting around my feet, and when I look at my feet, I see my shoes and I remember- Lorraine loved shoes. So I find a hacksaw in the basement-my hacksaw, by the way, from my toolbox-and I go upstairs and saw the heel off every right shoe in her closet.”

“Why every right heel?” The detail fascinated Nancy, an insight into Infante, maybe into all men.

“Because you don’t have to take both to ruin the shoes, you know? And she has, like, ten, twenty pairs of shoes. Half of ’em black, by the way. So when I’m done there’s just like this little pile of-” He gestured, incapable of defining what he had created.

“Dismembered shoes,” Lenhardt supplied.

“Yeah. I just left ’em in the middle of the rug.”

“She ever say anything?” Lenhardt again, the consummate cop, intent on getting the facts while the suspect was feeling voluble and expansive. Nancy was too dumbfounded to comment.

“Naw. I kept checking the precinct, too, but she never filed a report. So she knew it was me.”

Nancy finally thought of what she wanted to ask, the question she wanted to ask every mutt, but seldom got a chance. “Did it feel good, sitting on the floor of your old bedroom, sawing shoes?”

“Yeah. Well, actually, I cut my hand up a little, but I enjoyed every bit of it, absolutely.”

“You left trace evidence,” Lenhardt said, only half joking. “You could have fucked up your career over something like that.”

“Naw. I had a key, my name was still on the deed. And I bought those fuckin’ shoes, so I was just taking my half.”

“I wonder,” Nancy said, “what she did with all those leftover shoes. You think there’s a charity that specializes in giving shoes to one-legged women? Like, you might see a woman come hopping at you one day, and she’ll be wearing a pump from your ex-wife’s closet?”

“I tell you what,” Infante said. “That is the day I take a one-legged woman dancing.”

Their main courses arrived-cream-rich pasta dishes for the men, penne arrabbiata for Nancy, who had signed up for an online diet service that helped to track one’s daily calorie intake. It had a whole list of what you were supposed to eat in different kinds of restaurants, and it swore by penne arrabbiata in Italian places. She watched wistfully as the waiter grated fresh Parmesan on the others’ dishes, but shook him off with a noble little nod.

“There are about a million calories in that green stuff,” she said wistfully of the tapenade. Lenhardt and Infante, used to such non sequiturs from her, dug into their food, their chins hanging low enough to catch the steam from the hot bowls of pasta.

“What about you, Nancy?” Lenhardt asked. “You ever gotten back at anyone?”

“No one’s ever done anything to me. I mean, not like that.”

“Really?” For a moment, she thought Lenhardt knew she was lying. He was a good homicide police and being a good police meant knowing how to listen to everything, how to keep secrets and retain them for years, in the hopes they might be useful some day.

No, she told herself, trying to remember to chew her food with the careful “savoring” bites recommended by her e-Diet program, she was giving her sergeant too much credit. He didn’t know everything. The knowledge felt blasphemous, but good. It was not unlike the way she felt when she realized the priest at her cousin’s wedding was drunk, or that Father Mike couldn’t know if you didn’t tell him absolutely everything at confession. Even her computer wouldn’t know if she was lying, at day’s end, when she dutifully logged her meals. There was only one God and only He-she couldn’t help herself, she still thought of him as He in raised gilt letters-only He really knew what He wanted. Everybody else was just making it up as they went along.

Friday, June 26
10.

It was at the Catonsville branch of the Baltimore County Public Library that someone finally thought to call the police. The always busy branch was particularly antic on the third Friday in June, with children selling band candy and a community group gathering signatures on a petition for plantings along the Frederick Road median strip. Inside, the talk-loud, insistent talk, not at all library-like-was about the Fourth of July celebration, and whether there would be fireworks, given last year’s unfortunate incident. (A small fire, no injuries, but still it raised the question of whether the local Elks Lodge should be entrusted with this task again.)

Miriam Rosen, a patron at Catonsville for more than thirty years, always felt a surge of nostalgia for its more formal past. The reconfigured branch was so crowded, so overwhelmed by all the services that libraries were now expected to provide-not just books and periodicals, but compact discs and videos and DVDs and computers with Internet access-that it seemed more flea market than library. No wonder Starbucks had become so popular, Miriam thought. In Starbucks, a person could find a place to sit.

She parked Sascha, Jake, and Adrien in the children’s section, reminding Sascha to keep an eye on the baby, as Adrien was still known at age three. Twelve-year-old Sascha rolled her eyes, irritated, but that was as far as her adolescent moodiness had progressed. Miriam’s friends envied her this polite, solemn daughter, but Miriam considered Sascha almost too passive. She wanted her children to be fighters, quick to challenge authority, even hers.

Now, Jake was a toss-up-at age eight, he was a cipher, polite but secretive, with a con man’s charm, and Miriam sensed that his underwear drawer would yield all manner of contraband as he got older. Then there was Adrien, her late-in-life blessing, her favorite mistake, the Disney World souvenir, just like in the commercial. “You went to Disney World with an eight-year-old and a four-year-old, and still found a way to have sex?” her friends had marveled. Really, Adrien was a bit of a boast all the way around. Everyone in the Rosen family doted on Adrien, yet she was impossible to spoil. She soaked up love the way a napping cat absorbed sunshine. Look at her, sitting Indian-style at Sascha’s feet, paging through a picture book, absolutely contented. She was obedient without being a goody-goody, sweet but not saccharine.

“Sascha?”

“What?” The teenager gave the word two syllables, almost three.

“Keep an eye on Adrien,” Miriam repeated. She headed to the CD section to see what operas were available. The Baltimore Public Library was a bit populist for Miriam’s taste, skewing its collections to what people really wanted, as opposed to what they should want, so the classical music selection was thin. But Miriam never complained, perhaps because she felt a bit guilty about checking out CDs so she could download them onto her computer at home and, with Jake’s help, burn her own CDs. It wasn’t wrong, exactly, but it also wasn’t right-one of those middle-class everyone-does-it crimes, like speeding or rounding down on income taxes.

Miriam had been pregnant with Adrien when she began playing opera CDs on her endless bouts of chauffeuring the older two, hoping appreciation would come with repeated exposure. When she first left her job at the Homeless Persons Representation Project, she had tried listening to Italian language tapes, but her thoughts ended up drifting. She decided music might require less concentration, permitting her to check in and out. Like a baby in a womb, stereo speakers blasting Mozart at mother’s convex belly, she drove around in her Volvo, willing the music and foreign words to wash over her.

But so far, the only thing she had learned was how many little bits of opera had entered everyday life, like common foreign phrases so familiar they were no longer regarded as foreign. Miriam recognized melodies from Carmen because they had been incorporated into an episode of Gilligan’s Island, and she could hum Pagliacci’s lament only because it had been used to tout the wonders of Rice Krispies when she was a child. No, it was Adrien who sang along to Madame Butterfly, whose face brightened when a car commercial included that famous strand of notes from Lakmé.

Oh, to have the spongelike mind of a child again, to soak up knowledge as easily as you popped a Flintstone vitamin. Jake was at that stage where he wanted to know everything, everything, and he used his knowledge with an almost unattractive aggression, correcting Miriam until she got a bit sharp with him. Sascha was beginning to seek forbidden information in secret. Sascha being Sascha, this meant a copy of God’s Little Acre under her bed. Really, the girl was almost quaint in her attempts to rebel.

Blessed Adrien remained incurious about the world, content that it would reveal its mysteries to her soon enough. Which was fine with Miriam. Childlike wonder was a bit wearying the third time around.

Her CDs chosen- La Traviata and Manon Lescaut-Miriam checked out the new acquisitions, best-sellers all, and a table of for-sale items, last year’s best-sellers. Back in the children’s section, Sascha was lost in The Red Fairy Tales, the world forgotten as she leaned against the shelf, a piece of hair drawn between her lips. It was a lovely tableau, even with the hair-chewing bit. An incomprehensible teenage habit, yet Miriam had done it, too. Tasted her hair, split the split ends, plucked out one strand at a time, just because she could, because it was her hair to do with as she wished, and because this drove her mother crazy. For a moment, Miriam saw Sascha as a perceptive stranger might, a girl poised between childhood and adolescence. You rushed so hard to grow up, Miriam remembered-until you realized you had no choice. Then you wanted to slow down, draw childhood out, go back to simpler stories and simpler games.

It took her a second to register the fact that Adrien was nowhere to be seen.

“Sascha,” she said, feeling a mild irritation at the girl’s thoughtlessness, “where’s your sister?”

Sascha looked up, needing a moment to surface from her imaginary world. “Adrien? She’s right here. I mean, she was right here. Maybe she went off with Jake.”

Perhaps because it was a library, and perhaps because Miriam, too, loved fairy tales, it still didn’t occur to her to feel anything more than impatient.

But when she found Jake alone at one of the library’s computers-trying to hack his way past the filters, just to see if it could be done-a slight panic began a skipping beat somewhere between Miriam’s stomach and heart. Where had the baby gone? The three Rosens split up, looking everywhere. Adrien was not in the children’s section, or in the rest rooms, or curled up in an aisle’s cozy dead end. Miriam’s hands began to shake, and she had to exert enormous control not to yell at someone, anyone. Sascha and Jake, for their carelessness. The library staff, for running such a chaotic bazaar instead of a hushed, serious place for study. The other families, for daring to be whole.

The children’s librarian, who knew the Rosens well, made an announcement on the seldom-used PA system. If anyone sees a little girl with long curly hair in a green T-shirt and pink plaid pants, please bring her to the Information Desk. Yet the amplified voice could barely be heard over the buzz of the library. Ten minutes passed, fifteen, twenty. Miriam, hands shaking ever harder, insisted on calling the police despite the staff’s assurances that this happened every now and then, and the children always-always-turned up.

“Not always,” an old man muttered. “In California last week…” But no one wanted to listen to him.

The police took their time getting there. They still had not arrived when Jake had the idea of searching the lower level, used primarily for storage and the board’s monthly meetings. “There’s nothing scheduled down there today,” the children’s librarian said, “and the room is usually locked when it’s not in use.” But it was something to do, a way to keep moving forward, a way to still the doleful voices in Miriam’s head, the ones predicting the end of life as she knew it.

The three Rosens descended the stairs together, mother in the center, hand in hand. In the time it took to walk to the lower floor, Miriam saw every assumption she had made about her life torn from her. Twenty minutes ago, asked what she feared, she might have said that she hoped her children stayed away from drugs, that they would be spared cruelty, that they would go to good colleges and make happy marriages. Pressed to the outer limits of her imagination, she could have envisioned the horror of a sick child, or an injured one. But not a missing one and certainly not-but she couldn’t say it, even to herself. Don’t do this to me, she instructed God. Don’t you dare. Her nonobservant life-her so-so Seders, her refusal to fast on Yom Kippur-came back to haunt her. But even in utter despair, she could not vow to change, to love God more if he would bring her daughter back. She didn’t want to make a promise she knew she would forget to keep.

“Mom-” It was Jake, his voice careful. “You’re muttering.”

At the bottom of the stairs, they found themselves in a small foyer. Miriam reached out and placed a palm on the double doors that faced them, the way you were supposed to do in a fire. The doors were cool to the touch. She pulled and they balked, seemingly locked. But she yanked on them again, and the sticky lock disengaged, opening to reveal an empty meeting space.

Adrien was sitting quietly on the floor in a corner of the room, a picture book in her lap, other books scattered around her in a haphazard semicircle.

“Baby,” Miriam said, running toward her, arms outstretched.

Adrien frowned and sat where she was. “Not baby,” she corrected.

“Why are you down here? How did you get here?” Miriam had pressed the girl so hard to her shoulder that she couldn’t answer until she wiggled around, freeing her mouth.

“Lady said.”

“What lady? One of the librarians?” Miriam indicated the staff members who had crept down the stairs behind her.

Adrien studied them gravely, then shook her head. Because of her long amber curls and green eyes, she was used to admiring glances, but she had never had so many people watching her at once. She seemed to like it.

“Gone,” she said, with a dramatic sweep of her chubby little arm. “Lady gone.”

The police arrived as the Rosens were gathering their things. Miriam made a report only because she felt so sheepish. If she didn’t make a report, then she was a silly hysteric who had acted on groundless fears. A report made it true. She told the officer that she had left the baby under Sascha’s supervision-not to blame Sascha, she told herself, but to establish a record, in case it happened again. Someone had lured her daughter to that basement room, probably some dotty old lady. Still, she wouldn’t want another family to experience the panic she had just known. And there was the question of how the room had come to be unlocked, which seemed to bother the library staff even more than Adrien’s disappearance.

“It hasn’t been used since the library board met there yesterday,” the children’s librarian kept saying, “and the library board is not inclined to be careless about such things.”

“All’s well that ends well,” Miriam said, unashamed of the cliché. “I just want it on the record in case anything like this happens again.”

The young officer studied Adrien for a few seconds.

“Her shirt,” he said, “was it always on inside out?”

It was only then that Miriam noticed the seams, visible on the shoulders of the long-sleeved T-shirt that Adrien had insisted on wearing despite the day’s heat. Yes, there were the grass-green machine stitches, which looked like little surgical scars. The pink plaid pants were on right side out, though, and the shoes were still tied in Miriam’s distinctive rabbit ear. She was glad, looking at those shoes, that she had developed this silly way of tying shoes. If her daughter’s shoes had not been removed, then her pants had not come off. If the pants had not come off…then Miriam never had to think of this again.

Only she did. And when she did, she thought of the day as the knot on a piece of embroidery thread. The needle had poked through the muslin and was anchored in place by a strong knot, tight as a fist. But until it poked back through, creating that first small stitch, there could be no pattern. There was only a knot, a beginning, hidden on the other side of the cloth.

Saturday, June 27
11.

“Where’s the baby, Mom?” Alice asked Helen at breakfast. She had the “Lifestyles” section of the Beacon-Light propped up on the sugar dispenser, turned to the comics and horoscope.

“What?” Helen’s voice was sharp, her morning tone. “What baby? What are you talking about?”

“The doll’s head, the one that used to sit in the middle of your cut-glass saltcellars. I just noticed it’s not on the shelf anymore.” Alice pointed her forkful of fried egg at the wall next to the kitchen window, where painted shelves held the things Helen had started and stopped collecting over the years-saltcellars, vintage salt and pepper shakers, cobalt blue glassware.

“Oh.” Helen had a habit of touching her own face, her hair, her neck-not the usual pats and rubs that people used to put things back in place, but lingering strokes with her fingertips. She drew the skin of her forehead up and into her hairline, smoothing the furrows in her brow. “I got tired of it. It was too…precious. Like the time I nailed the old wedding dress to the wall. Remember that? The wedding dress on one wall, the black cocktail dress on the other.”

Alice did remember. She had an even clearer memory of the shoes that Helen had nailed below the dresses, the white and black pumps. The white ones had been attached to the wall sole down, side by side, prim and proper. The black spike heels had been driven into the wall through the vamps, so the phantom wearer appeared to be spread-eagled. There had been a pair of long black gloves as well, thrown wide, as if a singer were finishing a song. Helen had told people it was an artwork titled Madonna versus Whore, Part I. Young as Alice must have been at the time-seven, maybe eight-she had understood there would never be a Part II.

“Now that everyone else is doing stuff like that, it’s not so much fun,” Helen said on a yawn. She had slept late, as was her habit on Saturdays and Sundays, coming down at noon in her yellow silk robe, uncovered at the Dreamland vintage store years ago, back when most people were a little afraid to go down to that part of Baltimore. “I can’t run with the herd, you know.”

Alice knew, for it was the type of thing her mother often said of herself, in different ways. Helen Manning’s interest in her own personality was inexhaustible. I am not a morning person, she might announce, almost startled by the insight. I have never liked sweet potatoes. I simply cannot wear that shade of off-green. But then, most people were like that. Alice was odd because she didn’t find her quirks interesting. She wasn’t even sure she had any.

Still, she missed that doll’s head. It had been so unexpected, sitting there among Helen’s saltcellars. It was the old kind of baby doll, with lashed eyes and a rosebud mouth with a little hole, where a child could stick a bottle. Then, depending on how you held the doll, Helen had explained to Alice and her friends, the water-formula would flow out through the doll’s eyes or bottom. For a long time, Alice had assumed the head was one of the toys Helen had salvaged from her youth. Their house was full of Helen’s old playthings. But it turned out it was another flea market find, purchased because Helen found it interesting.

“Anything in the paper?” Helen asked.

“My horoscope says all eyes will be on me today-and that I’ll find something I misplaced.”

Helen’s hand knocked her cup, and although it didn’t turn over, it sent a great slosh of coffee over the Formica table. Automatically Alice got up and grabbed a sponge from the sink, wiping up before the spill could lap the edges of the newspaper. As a child, Alice had found this table embarrassing, although her friend Wendy had insisted she considered it, and the entire kitchen, extremely cool. “It’s like the Silver Diner,” she had said approvingly, inspecting the old-fashioned sugar container, the tin signs advertising various ice creams, forgotten flavors such as Heavenly Hash and Holiday Pudding. “Or TGI Friday’s.”

Wendy had not liked the living room, but then-neither had Alice. The furniture was fussy and uncomfortable, her grandparents’ castoffs. The walls had been kept a boring and now somewhat dingy white in order to showcase Helen’s real artwork, as she called it. These were bright oil paintings of animals doing housework. A dog making breakfast, a fox vacuuming, a duck changing a baby duck’s diaper. When visitors asked about the paintings, Helen always said they were ideas for a children’s book she had never gotten around to doing. Alice was glad the book never happened, because the paintings scared her. It was hard to explain why. Perhaps it was because the animals did not look happy as they went about their chores, and there were no human touches-no clothes, no bonnets. Alice thought the fox, for example, should be wearing an apron, a frilly one, and the dog should have a chef ’s hat.

“No, you don’t get it,” Helen had said when Alice tried to explain why the paintings disturbed her. “I don’t want to celebrate housework. I don’t want to make it pretty. If I put clothes on them, the paintings would become too cozy, too safe.”

Yet the baby duck was wearing a diaper, Alice noticed, although she didn’t point this out, for she knew her mother would say she was too literal. That was her mother’s primary complaint about Alice. She was too factual, too fond of numbers. “You’re a concrete thinker,” Helen had said once. Alice knew what this meant, more or less, but she couldn’t help imagining herself as a big blockhead, her head as square and hard as a rectangle of sidewalk.

“If you’re going to read the newspaper,” Helen said now, inspecting her sleeve for coffee stains, “you might consider the want ads. You’ve been home for more than two months and you still don’t have a job.”

“I’ve been going to places in person. I went to Westview Mall looking for a job. You told me I had to find a job, remember?”

“What kind of job were you looking for at Westview?”

“Clothing stores.”

“Those are hard to get.”

Hard for a fat girl, Alice thought, but said nothing.

“I don’t understand why you don’t try the fast-food places. There are a dozen of those places on Route 40 alone, and you could walk to most of them, or take the bus.”

“I said, I’m looking.”

“But they’re always hiring.”

“I’d rather not work at a fast-food place if I can find something else.”

“Why?”

Alice tried to think of a reason her mother might find acceptable.

“I don’t approve of what they’re doing.”

“What’s that?”

“Destroying the rain forest.”

“And I don’t care for what Baltimore city schools do half the time, but a person has to work, baby.”

“You won’t even eat at those places.”

“Yes, that’s true.” Helen reached for her bony hip, gave it a squeeze. “But you do. And if you eat it, you can’t then draw the line at working there for the rain forest’s sake. There’s nothing wrong with working at McDonald’s until you find something better.”

“But when will I have time to find something better if I’m behind a fryer every day?”

Helen didn’t answer. She had drifted back into her morning silence, her private thoughts. Alice ’s words often seemed to reach Helen on a delay, like some of those talk radio shows whose callers misbehaved. Minutes would pass, and Helen would suddenly respond to a question that Alice no longer remembered asking.

But when Helen spoke again this morning, it was all too clear she had heard every word Alice had spoken.

“I ran into Ronnie Fuller’s mother at the Giant. She said Ronnie had gotten a job.”

Ronnie Fuller’s mother. Alice tried to remember the woman, but she had been such a ghostly presence in the Fullers’ household, tiny and wan. She remembered the father and the brothers much better. She had always thought Matthew, Ronnie’s youngest oldest brother, liked her. He teased her a lot, pulling her braids and punching her.

“Yes?”

“At the Bagel Barn.”

“I wouldn’t want to work there.”

“No one wants you to work there. But the Bagel Barn happens to be next to Westview. Alice -what were you really doing over at Westview?”

“Looking for work.”

“Tell me the name of one place where you’ve put in an application.”

“The Safeway.”

“The Safeway’s at Ingleside.”

“I started at Ingleside and then went to Westview. It’s right across the street.”

“The Safeway’s union. They wouldn’t even let you apply.”

“I know. I asked. I asked to put an application in and they said no, but it still counts.”

“ Alice -”

“I did. CVS and Rite Aid, too. I’ve got no experience, and no one’s hiring. Except the convenience stores, and you said I couldn’t work there because they might put me on a night shift.”

“ Alice.” Helen grabbed her by the wrist. No lingering fingertip strokes for Alice, not in this situation.

“I’m not doing anything.” But that sounded defensive, so she altered it. “I mean, I’m not doing anything I shouldn’t be doing.”

“ Alice, baby. Baby, baby, baby.”

The old endearment felt ludicrous now that Alice was almost as tall as her mother and outweighed her by at least fifty pounds.

“You’ve got to let things go, baby.”

“I know.”

“You can’t undo what’s done, baby.”

“I know.”

“The past is the past, baby.”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry I ever said anything. You ask me things, and I answer, I tell you the truth. I always did. Maybe that makes me a bad parent. But you’ve got to put everything behind you.”

“I know.”

“I love you, baby.”

“I know.”

Alice began to feel as if they were singing a song to each other, like one of the old R &B songs her mother used to put on the stereo late at night, sitting in the dark with a glass and a cigarette. Alice wasn’t supposed to know about the cigarette, but she did because the music always woke her up and she crept to the top of the stairs, listening, too. She knew that smoking was bad, really bad. They taught this in school every year, beginning in first grade. But she couldn’t begrudge her mother those middle-of-the-night cigarettes, not even when she finally figured out her mother was smoking dope, which was even worse than tobacco. The nuns said you should call the police if your parents used drugs, or talk to the priest. But Alice wasn’t falling for that.

“I am really, truly looking for work, maybe not as hard as I could, but I am looking. It’s just-this is my first summer, my first real summer in so long. I want to have a little fun.”

She felt guilty, guilt-tripping her mother. It was too easy. Besides, she didn’t want to dribble her power away, didn’t want to squander it on small things. She had always been a saver-Helen called it “hoarding”-the type of child who put away her Christmas and birthday checks until the small amounts became medium ones. She had saved for things her mother found ridiculous, items that Helen would not buy for Alice no matter how inexpensive. “I’d rather have one pair of well-made Italian shoes than twenty pairs of shoddy, so-called stylish ones.” Actually, Helen had been known to treat herself to both. “But I’m a grown-up,” she would remind Alice. “My feet have stopped growing.”

Alice needed money to buy the things she knew would transform her. All she wanted was to be popular, and-slowly, surely-she had been inventing that girl. A girl who lived in a strange house, yes, with a strange mother, sure, but also a girl who was still cool enough to be friends with someone like Wendy. Helen’s approach to life, her preemptive disdain for the things that she could never have, was not Alice ’s way. She would rather be a minor star in a major constellation than to be a lonely, mediocre sun in an inferior solar system. That was the only thing she remembered from the high school astronomy unit taught at Middlebrook. Their sun was average, mediocre.

But it made her feel horrible, thinking such thoughts about Helen. Helen, who hadn’t had to be a mother, who truly chose to bring Alice into the world. She had been very candid with Alice about this, explaining how she had fallen in love with a man and they had rushed into things and the next thing Helen knew, she was pregnant and he was dead in a car crash. “Just like the president’s father,” she said, referring to the old president, the one who had been in charge when Alice went away. His father had died, too, before he was born. And his father was kind of a bum, too. Helen hadn’t made that connection, but Alice had figured it out. A good father didn’t die in a car crash before his baby was born. That only happened to a father who was out doing something he wasn’t supposed to do.

“Do you know what your horoscope says, Mom? ‘Aquarius: It’s time to see the world through fresh eyes. Be a friend to get a friend. Virgo, Pisces predominate.’ ”

“Lots of eyes in the horoscope today.”

“Do you know where that baby is?”

“What?”

“The doll’s head. Did you put it away in the basement or attic?”

“Oh, gee, I don’t know, baby. Why do you want that old thing?”

“I don’t know,” Alice said. “I miss it. I like things to stay the same.”

“Well, they don’t, baby. That’s the one thing I can guarantee you. Nothing ever stays the same.”

12.

The last customer of the day at the Bagel Barn was a tapper. She leaned forward from the waist, so she was eye level with the wire baskets of bagels, and hit the glass with her index finger the way a kid plink-plink-plinks the same key on a piano. Her nails were manicured-a tapper’s nails tended to be manicured-but relatively short, with clear polish, and Ronnie wondered why anyone would pay to get her nails filed straight across.

“Two sesame-no, three sesame, two poppies.” Tap, tap, tap. “Are the sunflower seed good? No? Yes? Okay, four plain, two sun-dried tomato.” Tap, tap, tap. “How many is that?”

“Eleven,” Ronnie said.

“Do you do thirteen for the price of a dozen?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Everyone else does.”

Ronnie shrugged, at a loss. Clarice, the Saturday manager, caught Ronnie’s eye and tried to share a smile with her, but Ronnie was scared to do anything with her face. O’lene, the kitchen worker, brushed her hip against Ronnie’s as she edged by, already starting her part of the closing routine, and Ronnie allowed herself a small bump back.

“It’s the end of the day,” the tapper wheedled. “You’re just going to end up throwing these away.”

“I’m not allowed, ma’am. I’m sorry.”

The woman continued to tap. It was almost as if the sound were part of her thinking process, as if she needed the tick-tick noise of her finger to get her brain to work.

Such end-of-the-shift customers were common on Saturdays, when people always seemed surprised by the 3 P.M. closing. The rest of the week, Ronnie’s shift ended without complaint, but Saturdays always saw some last-minute person, usually a woman, harried and disorganized.

For all that, and despite the crummy pay and early morning hours, Ronnie liked the Bagel Barn. On weekdays, once the morning rush ended, it was a gentle place that ran to solitary, undemanding folks who seemed to have a lot of time to sit and stare out the window while their coffee cooled. She worked the cash register, which paid less than the prep jobs, but she preferred it. She didn’t like the idea of touching other people’s food, because she didn’t want anyone handling hers. Sometimes, glancing over her shoulder, she would see Clarice place her broad hands on the back of the serrated bread knife and press it down through a fully loaded bagel. The tomatoes, so juicy this time of year, would spurt out the sides, leaving smears of red and small seeds on the cutting board. The sight made Ronnie queasy. Not the juice so much as Clarice’s black-and-white hands bearing down on the bagel, squeezing the life out of it. When Ronnie got hungry, she ate one of the sweet bagels, whole, like a cookie.

The best thing, in Ronnie’s opinion, was the limited menu. The Bagel Barn knew it was a place that sold bagels, and didn’t try to be anything else. After 11 A.M., you could get sandwiches-or sand-wishes, as Clarice called them in her lisp, which came and went depending on the fit of her dentures-but they came on a bagel. You could get an open-faced pizza, even, with tomato sauce and cheese, but you still had to have it on a bagel.

Yet there were always a few people who expected to be the exceptions, who asked for things they couldn’t have. Can I get that on whole wheat? No. Do you have French bread? No. Do you have focaccia? Ronnie didn’t even know what that was. Do you have lattes? No, no, no, she would say politely, trying not to show how much she enjoyed saying no. She did not understand where people got off, thinking they could have stuff that wasn’t on the menu. The menu was a kind of law, she thought, and people should obey it. Like a speed limit, or cleaning up after your dog. If they had allergies, they could go somewhere else. The menu should be-what was the word? The one printed on those fake checks that came in the mail, showing her parents what it would be like if they won a million dollars in a sweepstakes. Nonnegotiable, that was it. “Am I asking you?” Ronnie’s father had bellowed when his children expressed a preference for something other than the meal that sat in front of them. “Am I asking you?”

Ronnie could never yell at a customer, of course. The owners, who dropped in unexpectedly, would have fired her on the spot if they heard her being rude or disrespectful. But she had an ally in Clarice, who also disliked people who expected special treatment. Especially white people, suburban mothers like this one, who stopped by on their way to somewhere, forever in a hurry, always making special requests. Clarice hated white people, period.

Which was funny, because Clarice was more white than black. She was a black woman whose color had ebbed away, leaving splotches of brown and dark brown on her ghostly face and neck. Apparently she had whatever disease Michael Jackson was always pretending to have. Clarice hated Michael Jackson, too. She had confessed to Ronnie that she disliked white people in general, whereas she hated black people on an individual basis. She said everyone was this way, so it wasn’t really prejudice. You hated the people who were different from you as a group, but you hated people like you one by one.

“But I’m talking only on the other side of the counter,” she told Ronnie. “And mainly the women. The men are okay, at least around here. I used to work at the North Side Bagel Barn, near the big collitches, and everybody up there was bad. Saturdays were hell.”

Saturdays were slow at this Bagel Barn. On weekends, Ronnie had figured out, people could drive a little out of their way, go to fancier places with more choices. But that was good, too, because Clarice let her and O’lene, the kitchen prep girl, start close-up early so they could scoot as soon as the door was locked. She also let them take bags of bagels, although the Fuller family wasn’t much on bagels. Still, Ronnie liked bringing home that plastic bag of bagels for the freezer. It made her feel like her father, carting in cartons of sodas at week’s end, incomplete six-packs and forgotten-about flavors, like Mr. PiBB.

Ronnie had been assembling that day’s bag of bagels when the tapper had banged through the front door, pushing through with such authority that the bell seemed to ring a few more notes than usual. The woman wore workout clothes, almost always a bad sign, and she had her keys in her fist, another bad sign. Ronnie, stooped down behind the cases in order to make her selections, looked back at Clarice, who nodded. This was definitely someone who would want special treatment, who would berate them for being out of some bagels, even if it was fifteen minutes to closing. It had been agonizing, getting her to choose two dozen, but Ronnie finally had them bagged when the tapper straightened up as if startled by her own thoughts.

“I won’t have time to go to the grocery store,” the woman said. “So I might as well get some cream cheese here.”

“The spreads are in the refrigerator case on the far wall,” Ronnie said, carrying the two bags to the cash register. “Self-serve.”

The woman looked confused and glanced around, as if the refrigerator case were hard to find. Once she located it, she ran to it as if every moment counted. She pushed the prepacks around, disrupting the careful order that Ronnie had just established, knocking one or two to the floor and putting them back in the wrong places.

“But I need that-oh, the whatchamacallit, the special one.”

“Salmon spread?” Ronnie guessed.

“No, no, that’s not it.”

“Sun-dried tomato?”

“No,” the woman said, growing impatient, as if Ronnie should be able to name what she wanted, even if she herself couldn’t.

“Artichoke-parmesan?”

“Yes, that’s it.” She came back to the counter, carrying a plain and a veggie-lite. “Do you have any?”

“I can scoop some out for you,” Clarice said, using the sweet-as-pie voice that Ronnie knew she reserved for people she especially loathed. “Why don’t you make sure there’s nothing else you need while I do that?”

Clarice weighed and priced the artichoke-parmesan spread. The woman resumed tapping, deciding that she wanted yet another dozen. When Ronnie had peered at her through the glass, she had looked to be about thirty, in her leggings and clingy top. Close up, it was a different story. Her face, while surprisingly smooth, was tired and droopy. Her gaunt neck was beaded with lines. And with her head bent forward, Ronnie could see the gray roots in the chocolate-brown hair. She had to be forty-five, maybe even fifty.

Her order finally assembled, the woman began searching through her bag, looking for her billfold. It seemed to take forever for her to find it in the bulging canvas tote she carried, and when she did, she had no cash.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “I forgot I left the house without a cent. Can I write a check?”

Ronnie glanced at Clarice. This was one of the few areas where the manager had some say-so. The Bagel Barn did not accept checks as a rule, but Clarice had the authority to make exceptions.

“What’s the big deal?” the woman asked when Ronnie didn’t answer right away. “I’m good for it.”

What’s the big deal? That’s what everyone said when they wanted special treatment. What’s the big deal, what’s it to you? The big deal, Ronnie wanted to tell them, was that rules were rules and you had to follow them, or else the world got crazy, and you went crazy with it. She and her doctor had worked on this back at Shechter. “You can sometimes break rules for a reason,” her doctor had said. “But the reason can’t be ‘Because I feel like it.’ That’s what we call ethics, Ronnie. In certain situations, ignoring a rule because you realize that following it would do harm is the ethical thing to do. Everything else is just an excuse, a rationalization.”

“You got an ATM card?” Clarice asked. The woman nodded. “There’s a machine, right behind you. You can get cash out of that.”

“Oh, but the fee is so high. Two dollars on a twenty-dollar order. It’s a rip-off. Just on principle, I’d prefer to write a check.”

Ronnie looked at the woman’s canvas bag, which had leather handles and trim, at the rings on her thin hands, the tennis bracelet on her wrist. She knew Clarice had caught the same details. The woman wouldn’t miss two dollars. But the thing was, the tapper was the kind of person who would complain, who might call the owners and make trouble for Clarice. No more than three seconds passed as Clarice considered what to do, but the woman pushed her billfold impatiently at Ronnie, flipping it open to her driver’s license.

“I have ID. You can see I have ID. What, do you think I spend my Saturday afternoons kiting twenty-dollar checks?”

The photo on the ID showed the woman with a different hairstyle. A familiar hairstyle to Ronnie, and a familiar name. Sandra Hess. Maddy’s mom. Even the address was familiar to Ronnie, although she had never once been to Maddy’s house. But she knew the streets where the better-off St. William girls had lived. Maddy’s mom. She should have known her by her squinty eyes, her put-upon voice.

“You’re such a liar,” she said, not meaning to say it out loud.

“What? What?”

Clarice stepped forward. “Of course we’ll take your check, ma’am. Just make it out to the Bagel Barn and make sure you put a phone number on it.”

“Can I make it out for a little over?” Sandra Hess wheedled, and Ronnie knew she was pressing her advantage because of what Ronnie had said. She had the upper hand now. She probably didn’t even need the cash, but she was going to make them treat her special because that’s what women like Maddy’s mom did. Clarice nodded, and she wrote it for twenty dollars above the total.

Ronnie handed over the bagels. “Can I have extra freezer bags?” Of course she could. “Do you have a bigger bag than this, one with handles?” They did. When she was finally satisfied and had turned to go, Ronnie called to her.

“Say hello to Maddy for me.”

The woman turned back, instinctively gracious, clearly pleased by the very mention of her daughter. But her mouth ended up hanging open as she looked long and hard at Ronnie’s face. She then edged out the door backward. Once in the parking lot, she walked-ran to her car, a gleaming silver sedan, and drove away in the herky-jerky panic of someone who thought she might be pursued.

“What was that about?” Clarice asked, locking the door behind the fleeing tapper, although it was only 1:55.

“I went to grade school with her daughter. The girl was a jerk, and her mom was a bitch. I guess nothing changes.”

“But why did you call her a liar?”

Ronnie hated how smoothly her own lie came, how easy it was to deceive Clarice. “I could see the edge of some bills in her wallet. She had plenty of money, she was just saving it for something else. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”

“You got to keep those thoughts close,” Clarice said, worried for her. “I was thinking some much worse things, but you notice I didn’t say them out loud.”

Ronnie wished she could tell Clarice the true story, the whole story. How Maddy’s mother had gone on television giving interviews after Alice and Ronnie were arrested and charged. How she had told all sorts of lies about what had happened that day, so no one would think it was her fault. She said the girls had left the party without permission, that they had assured her they had a ride. Lie, lie, lie. But no one came after Maddy’s mother for anything. No one locked her up for not telling the truth. At least Alice didn’t get away with her lies. The world was full of liars.

Yet Ronnie had to lie, too, just to get along. Her doctor had said it was okay, that she did not owe the world the story of her life, that there were lies of omission and lies of commission, and the first kind was okay. But how she ached to tell the whole story. She wanted someone, anyone to take her side. She could not tell Clarice the truth about Maddy’s mother without telling Clarice everything, and then Clarice would never take her side again, in anything.

13.

Cynthia Barnes was on Nottingham Road, heading home. She found herself on Nottingham almost every day. She rationalized that it was an excellent shortcut, although she had managed to live in the neighborhood for years without using this secondary street. Now it seemed the perfect route to everywhere, and places that could be reached via Nottingham became preferable to those that could not. If Warren wanted Chinese food, for example, then the run-down carryout on Ingleside was clearly superior to their old favorite on Route 40. Cynthia told Warren she preferred the shrimp fried rice at Wung Fong, which she slathered with hot mustard until it was almost painful to eat. She really did like the fortune cookies, whose messages had a retro glumness missing in more modern ones.

On this particular day, she was driving home from visiting her sister, Sylvia, out in the suburbs. She had followed the odd stretch of highway that dead-ended at the edge of Leakin Park, where construction was halted years ago by environmentalists. A highway-to-nowhere, one of two in Baltimore. She tried to remember what had stopped this one. Opponents had argued that the park was a valuable ecosystem, a refuge for deer and other wildlife in the heart of the city. Leakin Park’s reputation as a place to dump dead bodies was temporarily forgotten and it became a sylvan glade in the heart of the city. Funny, what people could come to believe, so quickly and so fiercely.

Be careful what you wish for, as a Wung Fong fortune cookie might warn. The deer population, all those little Bambis whose photos had helped to block the highway, was out of control, raiding gardens in the nearby neighborhoods. Cause and effect, Cynthia thought, cause and effect. Very few people had the patience or rigor to think things through. Save the park, save the deer, and now the deer rampaged through the local gardens and there was still no effective east-west route through the city. Happy now? Was everybody happy now?

Even if her life had adhered to the smooth, easy path that she and everyone else had assumed was her birthright, Cynthia would have been cynical about the passions that direct public policy. Her tenure in city government had left her with little respect for anyone. She could see all sides of an issue, she liked to tell Warren -and the primary thing she could see was that no one was ever right, about anything.

Take taxes. The public was so easily duped on this issue. Property and income taxes were sacred cows in Maryland government. Politicians didn’t touch them in bad times and only pretended to cut them in good, spreading the pain around in invisible ways-enabling legislation that allowed jurisdictions to muscle in on everything from videotape rentals to building permits to junk food. When she sat in the back of the city council chamber listening to the gored ox of the day-that was her term for the constituents-drone about the pain exacted by some tax hike and urge the city to tighten its belt, it was all she could do not to laugh. She wanted to follow them into the street, ask them what they would do if someone decided to cut their household budget by 10, 20 percent for a year. No one ever wanted less in this life. Everyone wanted as much as they had yesterday, plus a little more.

Cynthia had been able to leave her eighty-thousand-dollar-a-year job without a pang because Warren ’s income was spiraling up, up, up. A plaintiff ’s attorney, he took on the black clients who had missed various legal bandwagons-lead paint, tobacco, asbestos. He was now part of the cell phone litigation. The money just kept rolling in, and Cynthia no longer had any idea what to do with it, except watch it accumulate.

The city had moved on, elected a new mayor. Even if Cynthia wanted to work, there was no job for her now, or so she told herself. And in this way, her thoughts took her one, two miles, from the looping exit of the dead-end highway onto Security Boulevard and then to Cook’s Lane and up Nottingham, past the house where Alice Manning lived with her mother.

Cynthia noticed the woman in the bikini first. Thin and youthful looking at first glance, she betrayed her age on Cynthia’s second glance, which picked up on the telltale signs of a woman trying too hard-the little ruche of flesh at the midsection that seemed to affect almost every middle-aged woman, the sarong knotted at the waist, possibly in hopes of hiding less-than-perfect legs. Then there was the slack in the upper arms as the woman lifted her arm to shield her eyes, looking into the distance, toward the corner, where a heavyset blond woman was trudging along.

A heavyset blond woman. It took a beat to reconcile this figure with the image Cynthia carried in her head-a milk-bland little girl, her eyes wide and her mouth set, looking more amazed than anything else. Cynthia made a sudden right turn, glancing into the backseat to see if the abrupt movement had awakened the sleeping Rosalind, then turned back onto Nottingham.

So this was Alice Manning at eighteen. Fat, listless-looking, and paler than ever, although her arms had a pinkish hue, the beginning or the end of a bad sunburn. These things should have pleased Cynthia, but they just made her angrier. Because fat was a sign of life, proof of something that continued to live and grow and even thrive, however unattractively.

I could kill her, she thought. I could turn the wheel to the left and kill them both. Sure, it would be suspicious, but let the authorities try to prove it was anything other than an accident. Make them prove intent. After all, the ambiguity of intent had been so crucial in Olivia’s death. Warren would make sure she had the best criminal defense attorney in the city, assuming it went that far. Cynthia was willing to bet that a grand jury would no-bill her.

But Rosalind was in the backseat, so Cynthia drove sedately by, her gaze fixed on Helen Manning. What was it like for an attractive woman to have an unattractive child? Did a good-looking woman ever reconcile herself to having a child whose face did not invite loving coos and fond glances? Of course, Cynthia knew the answer to those questions.

The thought came and went so quickly, she could have pretended never to have had it. But something akin to heartburn fanned out in her upper chest and throat. Cynthia drove miserably home, where she tried to be a little cool to Rosalind for the rest of the afternoon, as if that could compensate for the momentary betrayal of Olivia.

Alice noticed the BMW, but only because it was shiny and big, moving so slowly up the street, and then doing the curious turn and circling back, like someone who was lost. Helen didn’t notice the SUV at all because she was staring with dismay at Alice ’s sunburn-pressing her fingertips into the soft flesh of her daughter’s upper arms, shaking her head at the white marks that appeared.

“A girl with skin like yours should never go out without putting on something with an SPF of 15 or higher,” Helen said. “Now, I have a little olive undercoat to my complexion, even though my hair has so much red in it. In my day, I could lie out with nothing but baby oil on and not get burned. But you have your father’s skin.”

In my day was another Helen-ism, her day being defined, whether she realized it or not, as the months between college graduation and Alice ’s birth. But she almost never mentioned Alice ’s father, in any context, and it gave Alice a rare opportunity.

“What was he like? My father?”

“Handsome. Big-broad-shouldered, very tall. Hair a shade darker than yours.”

This was how Helen always described Alice ’s father, in physical terms, and Alice seldom pressed her for more information.

“I mean, what kind of person was he?”

“Well, very…capable. He was all alone in the world, had been since he was seventeen. An orphan, with no brothers and sisters.” Her mother was always adamant on this point. Her father had no relatives, not even a cousin, that Alice could hope to find. “Strong. If he had gone to college, he might have been an architect. As it was, he built houses, from the ground up.”

“I’d like to be an architect,” Alice said, then realized she was saying this only to test the idea. Once she gave voice to the desire, she knew she’d like nothing less.

Helen continued to press on Alice ’s arms, ghostly fingerprints appearing only to disappear again. Her touch felt unexpectedly good on Alice ’s scorched skin, for her mother’s hands were cool and greasy with the lotion she had applied for her late-afternoon sunbath, a habit of long standing. She would spread her towel in the backyard, near the fence overhung with honeysuckle, between the hours of four and five-never any earlier, and never for a second more than an hour-and always with an exotic drink at her side. Over the years, Helen had fixed herself piña coladas and Mudslides and daiquiris, Cosmopolitans and Appletinis. This summer’s drink was a julep, made with mint that grew wild in the yard. Helen prepared her juleps with a sterling silver muddler, and the preparation of the drink took almost as long as the sunbath.

“Speaking of what you’d like to be,” Helen said, “have you found a job yet?”

“No, but that’s what I’m doing. Looking for a job.”

“I know the economy isn’t as flush as it was, but you sure are having a hard time of it.”

“Yes, I am,” Alice agreed.

She had no intention of finding a job, and had not been looking for one on this hot Saturday. A few weeks back, she had made inquiries at the county’s social services department, which had a job placement program. But she didn’t hear what she wanted to hear, so she left. Alice was, however, following Sharon ’s advice. She walked up to six, seven miles a day, yet she didn’t appear to be losing any weight. She walked morning and night, usually west, until her feet were sore and cracked at the heels. She walked along Frederick Road and ended up at the community college, where she took home course information for the fall semester. She detoured through the pretty old neighborhoods along Frederick Road -Ten Hills, North Bend, Catonsville -and made up stories about the families she saw in the old Victorian houses, with their big porches and cupolas.

Today, she had walked to Westview Mall, drawn by the memory of the G. C. Murphy’s. Alice had loved the old dime store, with its smells of fresh-popped popcorn and wooden floors. She used to buy chocolate-covered peanuts there, and she had never found ones that tasted quite the same, even as her mother brought her Brach’s and Russell Stover’s, Fannie Farmer and See’s on visiting days at Middlebrook. Exasperated, Helen finally told Alice that her memory was playing tricks on her, but Alice trusted her mouth’s insistent recall. G. C. Murphy was long gone, but she had a theory that the dollar store that had taken its place might be the best place to find a similar treat, that the flavor had been captured in the walls, in the floorboards.

She had not headed out with the plan of seeing Ronnie. But she couldn’t forget Helen’s mention of Ronnie’s job, at the bagel place over by Westview. The Ronnie she had known had no talent for routine. The most basic requirements at school-bringing permission slips, milk money-had defeated her. She wondered what Ronnie looked like, how she had changed, if at all. If she saw Ronnie, she might understand what people felt when they looked at Alice. Her mother and Sharon had seen her pretty regularly over the past seven years, so it wasn’t as if they had to adjust to a whole new Alice when she came home. But they acted as if they had, as if they expected a little girl, and didn’t know what to do with this heavyset eighteen-year-old who looked so much older than she was. It wasn’t Alice ’s shape that made her look old so much as the way she moved, dragging her feet as if her legs were swollen. Store clerks called her “ma’am,” and she probably could have gotten served in a bar if she were so inclined. She wasn’t. But seeing Ronnie-yes, seeing Ronnie had a definite allure.

She wasn’t sure what feelings might surge up if she saw Ronnie again. Hatred, of course. Time had dulled that emotion somewhat-Alice’s stomach no longer twisted at the mere thought of Ronnie, and the girl was largely gone from her dreams-but hatred was still there, along with the desire to see her punished, really and truly.

Once, just once, Sharon had come close to saying what Alice needed to hear, but she had said it in the odd roundabout way she used with Alice. This was just a few years ago, when Alice was forced to go back to the chaos of Middlebrook after a year in a smaller, much more pleasant juvenile home. She was upset about leaving the old stone building where she thought she would get to stay until she was eighteen, and in her hurt she had lashed out at Sharon. Why had the law treated Alice and Ronnie as if they were the same kind of girl, guilty of the same things, when everyone should know they were not?

“Well, imagine Ronnie was someone who went swimming and got a cramp,” Sharon began.

“In her stomach or her leg?” Alice asked.

The question seemed to catch Sharon off guard, although it seemed reasonable to Alice. It would make a big difference, where the cramp was. “In her stomach, I guess. And she begins to drown, and you’re swimming nearby, so you go over and try to help her. But sometimes drowning people get panicky and they grab the people who are trying to save them and drag them down, and they both end up drowning.”

“Does it happen a lot?”

“Um, no. Because lifeguards are trained to handle panicky swimmers. I was a Water Safety Instructor.” Alice was used to Sharon ’s tendency to bring every subject back to herself, so she barely noticed this stray bit of information. Besides, Water Safety Instructor didn’t sound very cool, not like being a lifeguard, on a high chair with a white-creamed nose. “But if you’re just another swimmer passing by, you might not know what to do when someone grabs you.”

Alice thought about this. It still sounded as if it was her fault, then.

“If you’re not a lifeguard and the person grabs you, are you allowed to push them off you? Is it okay to leave them to drown?”

The question left Sharon uncharacteristically silent. She placed her hand on her left cheek, rubbing her spots. Alice had noticed that Sharon reached for that part of her face whenever they came close to discussing how unfair everything was. Perhaps it was unfair that Sharon Kerpelman, a not unpretty woman, had been born with those spots on her face. But that was nothing compared to Alice ’s life. Besides, Sharon ’s story made Ronnie sound almost normal, doing what anyone might do, in order to survive.

Alice could have told Sharon the story of how Helen had taken her and Ronnie out to the Baskin-Robbins on Route 40 one summer night and bought them both double-scoop cones. This would have been the summer between third and fourth grade, when Ronnie had attached herself to the Mannings like a stray cat they had made the mistake of feeding. Helen didn’t seem to mind that she was always around, but Alice did. After all, she was the one who would have to distance herself from Ronnie when school began again in the fall, peeling her off like a piece of gum on her shoe.

At the Baskin-Robbins, Alice had gotten vanilla and chocolate, despite Helen’s urging to be more original, while Ronnie had opted for chocolate chip and orange sherbet, a truly gross combination that she copied from Helen. Only Ronnie’s top scoop, the chocolate chip, rolled to the floor with her first lick.

“Oh, baby,” Helen began. But before anyone could say anything else, Ronnie turned around and knocked Alice ’s cone to the floor. “Don’t laugh at me,” she had shrieked at Alice, who had not made a sound. She had smiled, perhaps just a little bit. But Ronnie’s back was to her, so how could she know that? Helen had wheedled the counterman into giving both girls new cones, but the evening’s happy promise was gone. A second cone simply made Alice aware of losing the first one, which meant this one could be lost, too. She ate her ice cream with such tiny, cautious licks that more melted down her arm than ended up in her mouth.

All these memories had crowded into Alice ’s head as she sat on a curb with her just-purchased bag of chocolate-covered peanuts, studying the Bagel Barn. The restaurant sat off by itself on the edge of the parking lot, not quite part of the mall, not completely on its own. The Bagel Barn had been many things, even in Alice ’s short memory of what she thought of as the before time. It had been a White Castle, a Fotomat, then a taco stand. At some point, while she was gone, it had been expanded from its original little hut shape, so it now had a seating area, and the roof had been painted red. But it didn’t have a lot of customers, and Alice bet it would be something else within a year or two. That was the kind of place that would hire Ronnie Fuller, a place on its way down.

She couldn’t go in, of course. It was one thing to see Ronnie, another thing to let Ronnie see her. And the restaurant’s placement made it hard to get too close to it. So she sat back on the curb near the mall. She should give up, go about her day. Her horoscope for this morning had said “Finding the right answers depends on knowing the right questions,” which had sounding promising, but also demanding.

Even as she told herself to leave, Alice sat for five more minutes, then ten, then twenty. The day was hot, and she was tired from all her walking. Shortly before 2 P.M., she saw two girls come out of the Bagel Barn and light up cigarettes. One was a short girl in an apron, one of those people who could be anything-black, Spanish, Italian. The other was a thin girl with dark hair. Ronnie.

She was taller, but not by much, and although she had a bust, she still had a way of carrying herself as if she just didn’t care about her body. Her posture was bad, a little stooped, and she folded her arms across her breasts as if they annoyed her. Her dark hair was worn in the same way-a bang across the front, the rest hanging to her shoulders. If she had tried to style it in any way, it didn’t show. Alice reached for her own hair, which had remained pale blond and stick straight. It was quite the prettiest thing about her. Helen had said so, years ago, in just those words, and it remained true. “Your hair is beautiful, baby. Quite the prettiest thing about you.” Alice thought her blue eyes were a nice color, but Helen said blue eyes were even more striking on a brunette. Like Ronnie.

Ronnie stared across the parking lot, straight at where Alice was sitting. But Alice didn’t panic or try to run away. People couldn’t see what they weren’t looking for. She had the advantage of knowing that Ronnie worked here. But Ronnie had no expectation of seeing Alice on the edge of the Westview Mall parking lot. It was almost as good as being invisible.

The aproned girl said something and Ronnie appeared to laugh. She hunched up her shoulders and bobbed her head, looking as if she was enjoying herself. She dragged hard on her cigarette, throwing back her head on the exhales. When had she learned to smoke? You couldn’t smoke at any of the places Alice had been. Not even adult prisoners were allowed to smoke these days. Had Ronnie smoked when they were little? Alice had no memory of it. But she had always suspected that Ronnie knew all sorts of things she didn’t tell. That was what Alice had been trying to get the grown-ups to understand back then: Ronnie had secrets. Ronnie knew things she wasn’t supposed to know, which was what made her so dangerous.

Ronnie took the cigarette from her mouth and dropped it into a low ceramic pot, what Helen called a “butt beach,” one of those little containers of sand outside restaurants and movie theaters. Helen hated these fixtures, not because she objected to smoking, but because they were always ugly and cheap looking. The butts sticking up in sand, some with lipstick-smeared ends, made Helen shudder.

Now Alice shuddered, too. But it wasn’t the cement basin that bothered Alice, it was seeing Ronnie use it. The very neatness, the orderliness of this act was disorienting. It was natural for Ronnie to smoke. But once her break was over, she should have flicked her butt into the air in a careless arc and let it fall where it may. Ronnie was the kind of girl who littered, dropping candy wrappers and soda cans in the gutter. At least she had been. Ronnie was the bad one. There shouldn’t be any confusion about this, even now. Especially now.

Her latest attempt at chocolate-covered peanuts, forgotten while she was watching Ronnie, had melted to mush in the brown paper sack in her hand. It was just as well. They weren’t going to taste like the old ones. Nothing did. Strange, when she tried to stand, her breath caught in her throat and her lungs seemed to slam shut, as if she were the one who was drowning.

14.

Daniel Kutchner eased himself out of Sharon Kerpelman with the sweet-but-sheepish air of a man who had just had sex with someone he might never see again. Sharon didn’t mind. She had made a similar decision about Daniel before they ended up in bed, but the evening had a little momentum going for it. At least she would be able to tell her mother with a clear conscience that she’d really tried. She would not be explicit, of course, telling her mother that she and Evelyn Kutchner’s son had-what was the hideous phrase she had heard a twenty-something toss off the other day-landed the deal. But her mother would figure it out, and appreciate the codes that Sharon used to convey such information. Nice enough. No real chemistry.

“Bathroom?” he asked.

“The first door on your right, when you go out in the hallway,” she said. Was he a washer, she wondered. Or did he just need to pee? Both, as it turned out. She listened as one stream of water followed another. She rather liked his fastidiousness.

So what was wrong with Daniel Kutchner? Some women, aware that they had dated their way into an instantaneous dead end, might have turned the question on themselves, but Sharon never would. She got up, comfortable enough in her skin so that she didn’t feel the need to put on a robe or T-shirt, and headed out into the hall, knocking on the bathroom door as she passed by.

“Do you want anything? I’m going to fix myself a drink.”

This interrupted the third stream of water-probably from the faucet. Daniel Kutchner must be washing his hands now.

“You mean, like a glass of water, or a soda?”

“I have those, too,” Sharon said. “But I was thinking of a drink-drink, truthfully. I like to have a glass of white wine, or Bailey’s on the rocks before I go to sleep. I’ve got a full bar.”

“How not-Jewish,” Kutchner said through the door and they both laughed, for it was the theme of the evening, the pleasant bond they had established over dinner, making a list of what was Jewish and what was not. “Okay. Sure. Whatever you’re having.”

Sharon wandered through her apartment, which would have surprised her coworkers if they had ever been invited to see it. Her apartment was the only clue to Sharon ’s secret: She could afford to work at the public defender’s office because there was family money. Not a lot, but enough to close the gap between the barely middle-class lifestyle afforded by a government wage and the upper-middle-class life to which she was accustomed. That’s why it was nice, bringing home someone like Daniel, who knew about the Kerpel-mans and the small foundations company that had made everyone permanently comfortable when it began catering to postop breast cancer patients.

She returned to the bedroom with two old-fashioned glasses, aluminum Russell Wright knockoffs, on a matching tray, and set them on the bedside table.

“How civilized,” Daniel said, coming back into the room. He was skinny and on the short side, and his hairline would probably start receding soon. But those things didn’t matter to Sharon. The real problem with Daniel Kutchner was that her mother had picked him out for her, as his mother had picked Sharon out for him, and this could not be overcome.

He sat on the side of the bed, as if he hadn’t decided whether to sleep or flee. Sharon didn’t care if he left eventually. The only thing she asked of her intermittent lovers was that they talk to her afterward. Hence, the ritual of the drink. If she had smoked, that would have worked, too. But she didn’t, and so few people did now. But confronted with an offer of a drink, few men could insist on going to sleep, or running out the door.

Daniel set his glass back down, knocking over a small wooden frame. As he righted it, he peered at the face in the photograph, just visible in the available light coming from the bathroom.

“Who’s this? Not you with these pigtails.”

“No, I was never a blond, that’s for sure.”

“Niece?”

“Client.”

The photo was one of Alice, an old snapshot that Helen Manning had given Sharon for reasons she could no longer recall. She only knew it was a “before” photo of sorts, a picture of Alice from earlier in the summer of her eleventh year. A snapshot of a perfectly normal-looking little girl. Which was the point, of course, the thing that Sharon had never wanted anyone to forget.

“Client? Why do you have a photo of a client by your bedside?”

“Because it was probably the most amazing case I’ll ever be involved with.” She had meant to be a little hyperbolic, but realized the words, once spoken, were the simple truth. “You’re from Baltimore, right?”

“Originally.”

“Seven years ago-I’m not sure if it was in newspapers outside the area-two little girls were accused of killing a baby.”

“And that girl is-”

“One of the accused. Even now, even here, I wouldn’t say her name to you. It’s privileged. We kept their names private, which was no small thing, let me tell you.”

“So they weren’t tried as adults?”

“They were eleven!” Sharon ’s voice rose automatically, and she had to remember to yank it back down to a tone better suited to a postcoital chat. “There was no provision in Maryland law to try children that young as adults. Not that the parents of the victim didn’t push for that. And then, when it was clear the family wouldn’t get its way, the victim’s mother threatened to lobby to have the law changed, so homicides could be moved into adult court no matter what the age of the accused.”

“Bad cases make bad law, right?”

“Yeah. And she had the juice, her family was connected. She could have done it. That’s why we were forced to compromise.”

“How so?”

“At the time, the law held that juveniles couldn’t serve more than three years for any one crime. The other girl’s lawyer and I crafted a plea that allowed the state to give them seven years on three counts-homicide, kidnapping, and felony theft. For the baby carriage,” she added, anticipating his question. “I don’t remember the brand, but it was one of those things that was expensive because it was so light.”

“Like a laptop,” Kutchner said. “Or a cell phone. The smaller it is, the more you pay.”

Sharon nodded, annoyed at the interruption. “So they went away until they were eighteen, and the victim’s mother calmed down. Eventually.” She swirled the Baileys in her glass, watched the creamy pale brown liquid flow over the ice. “Truthfully, I’ve always thought my client would have been better off if I could have taken the case into an adult court, with a jury and the public’s full oversight.”

“How can that be?”

“She told me she was innocent. That she wasn’t there when it happened. She was with Ron-the other girl-when they took the baby, but it was a kid thing. They thought the girl had been left alone, they were trying to do the right thing. They didn’t set out to be criminals, to do something violent. Something went wrong.”

“How did-I mean-”

“Suffocation. That was another thing. The child’s death wasn’t inconsistent with SIDS. I could have argued that.”

“Isn’t that paradoxical? Arguing that your client wasn’t there, arguing that your client might have been there but the death was due to natural causes.” Daniel Kutchner was an accountant.

“A good defense doesn’t have to be consistent.”

No sound came from Daniel Kutchner’s side of the bed, except for the ice in his glass, a small swallow, a slight creak in the springs as he shifted his weight. An accountant sitting in judgment on a lawyer. Sharon decided not to mention what accountants had wrought in recent years.

“In a way, I’ve always felt Alice was sacrificed.” Sharon did not even notice she had given up the name she was usually so vigilant about protecting.

“Sacrificed?”

“There was so much…bad feeling about what happened. The victim was black, the accused girls were white. As you can see. And the media harped on the case so. People wanted to feel that something had been done. They wanted guarantees that it would never happen again. Which is impossible. Look, there are cases of young killers going back hundreds of years. And I don’t mean sociopaths, or some stupid bad seed scenario. Kids kill. To me, the amazing thing is that they don’t kill more often. Because they don’t really get it, you know? Death, I mean.”

She did not share with him her fantasy of trying Alice before a jury of her true peers, a dozen little big-eyed girls who knew what it was to make mistakes out of no larger sin than the desire to go along and get along. She imagined twelve little gamma girls-or was Alice a beta, according to the terms set out in the flurry of literature on “mean girls”-watching her solemnly as she laid out the facts, described Ronnie’s sway over her client. It would have taken such a jury less than an hour to acquit Alice.

“Except-you don’t think your client did kill.” Daniel Kutchner had leaned against the headboard, but his left leg dangled over the side of the bed, still in contact with the floor, like an actor trying to make love according to the old Hays Code. He wasn’t the type to stay overnight, which was fine with Sharon, the best of all possible worlds. As long as they didn’t rush into the night or escape into sleep immediately after sex, she didn’t care what they did.

“No, she didn’t.”

“Then why would you let her serve seven years? Why didn’t she draw less time than the other girl?”

“The evidence was…somewhat contradictory. And the girls’ statements were diametrically opposed. She said-she said. The judge who presided couldn’t see any fair way to sort it out.”

“Sounds like your client got screwed.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

The band had tried to quit at 1 A.M., but Andy-tie undone, jacket shorn-had seized the microphone and demanded that the wedding guests open their wallets and pay for another set. Nancy, filled with liquid goodwill, beamed at her husband. This was the man she had fallen in love with, boisterous and confident. The feds did not encourage such personalities, and he had to keep himself so tamped down at work that his broad shoulders had rounded a little and his head seemed to hang at times, heavy on his neck. She hoped the law, once he finished school and entered a practice, would restore some of Andy’s self back to him.

Now, dropped to one knee on the dance floor, bills clenched in his fist, he was every bit the boy she had known since junior high and loved since high school. “More,” he bellowed. “More, more, more. We will have music. And the bar will stay open. A Polish wedding can’t end this early. It would be shameful.”

Eventually the reception ended, and neither Nancy nor Andy was really in any shape to drive. But neither was anyone else, so they ambled to the Double-T Diner out on Route 40, albeit on the opposite end from New York Fried Chicken. There, her latest diet long forgotten, Nancy dragged french fries through gravy with her left hand and held on to Andy with her right. With his free hand, he flipped through the tabletop jukebox, but it was a bit of a gyp, for the restaurant’s sound system was dominated by whoever had the fastest quarter. A Bon Jovi song bounced through the night, and she couldn’t tell if it was one of their old ones or one of their new ones that sounded like one of their old ones. She could have been eighteen again, it could have been the night of her senior prom. Her brides-maid’s dress, a yellow horror, would have fit right in at the Kenwood High School prom.

Nancy was one of the few people she knew who admitted to being happy in high school. Why was that such a badge of shame for others? She didn’t see it as some Glory Days high point, but it had been fun, and she had been conscious of the fact that life wouldn’t always be fun, or easy. And it was for this very reason that she had gloried in eighteen, hadn’t wasted a minute of it. True, she had worried about her weight even then, but what she wouldn’t give to have back her teenage body. Even the low points-the brief breakups with Andy, the science classes that had almost sunk her completely-had made her appreciate the effortless fun, day in and day out.

Andy was trying to put a french fry in his coffee.

“I am so driving home,” she told him, not minding that he was wasted. He worked hard; he had earned this.

“Let’s”-it came out a little slurred, but nowhere near as bad as it might have been-“let’s drive up to Gunpowder Falls.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now. Why not now? Like we used to.”

“Like we-” Then she got it.

Within forty-five minutes, she was on top of him in the bucket seat of his Jeep Cherokee, part of her mind grateful for the room these SUVs provided, another part thinking how funny it would be if some county patrol cop came tap, tap, tapping at their window with his flashlight, then saw Nancy astride Andy, the yellow horror pushed above her hips and below her breasts, revealing the wretched strapless bra that had been digging into her all night. Andy couldn’t have gotten that off with a knife, the shape he was in.

“Evening, Officer,” she imagined herself saying, holding up her badge to the window. “I’m Homicide Detective Porter and this is Federal Agent Porter, from the local ATF field office.”

But they were left alone, so Nancy settled for the efficient, shuddering pleasures her husband provided. At the last minute, he asked if she wanted him to pull out, as he hadn’t brought anything with him, but she just held him hard inside her, shaking her head. Later, she wondered why she hadn’t minded taking the chance. Certainly it wasn’t because she was worried about the dress.

Helen Manning saw the sun come up that Sunday. More accurately, she saw the light seeping into her kitchen, which faced east, while she sat in her still-dark living room. Her glass was long empty, had been for hours. She had allowed herself exactly three cigarettes, and these were long gone, too. The cigarettes had been the tobacco variety because dope was something she had only when the right man was in her life, and there were fewer and fewer men these days. Strange, but she had dated even more infrequently after Alice went away, which seemed counterintuitive. After all, it should have been easier to meet men when she was unencumbered, but she found she had little taste for it. Helen preferred the admiration of men to their companionship. And that was easy to get, as long as a woman kept herself up. Helen could go weeks on the warmth of a single glance in the supermarket. She still turned heads.

Finally she heard the sounds she had waited all night to hear-a car door slamming, footsteps on the walk, the storm door opening, the key in the unlocked lock, turning one way, then the other.

“Good morning,” she said to Alice.

“You don’t need to wait up for me.”

“It’s six A.M.”

“Really, you shouldn’t worry.” Alice ’s voice, which had been husky even as a child, was a pleasant contralto, all warm concern.

“You’ve been out all night. Where did you go? Who were you with?”

“Nowhere. No one. I’m sorry, I just can’t sleep these days. So I walk.”

“It’s dangerous.” Her voice scaled up, unintentionally tentative, making the maternal assertion sound like a question.

“Not where I go.”

“Which is-”

“You know, you should go to sleep, Mom. You’re useless if you don’t get your eight hours.”

It was just what Helen said about herself, all the time. I’m useless if I don’t get my eight hours. Alice had repeated it back in her usual pleasant voice, with no judgment attached. Yet Helen felt judged all the same. With or without eight hours of sleep, she was useless to her daughter now and would be until she gave her what she wanted, until she told her what she wanted to hear.

If only she could.

Friday, July 3
15.
7:30 P.M.

Brittany Little disappeared late in the afternoon on the first day of the holiday weekend, wandering away from her mother and her mother’s boyfriend while they shopped for a sofa in Value City.

“One minute she was there,” her mother, Maveen Little, kept telling police, “and then she wasn’t.” No one seemed to believe the minute part, Maveen could tell. Who could lose a child in a minute? But she was adamant: She and her boyfriend, Devlin Hatch, could not have turned their backs for more than a minute as they studied the love seats and sleepers and couches. A minute was a long, long time. “Count it out for yourself,” she snapped at the young officer, who was acting sympathetic. But if they believed her, why wasn’t she talking to a detective yet? Why were these officers baby-sitting her and Devlin in their own apartment, instead of searching the city for her baby?

The two patrol officers had said they needed to come to the apartment to get a photo of Brittany for the evening news. Maveen knew they also wanted to poke around her home, look for evidence that wasn’t there. They seemed to suspect Devlin more than her, but that was just as infuriating.

“Look, when a child goes missing, we always find them,” said the younger of the two young officers, Ben Siegel, the one who had been left to sit with her on the old sofa. This was the piece of furniture Maveen and Devlin had hoped to replace when he got his insurance check. She wanted to explain that she knew it was beat-up and old, that it had been a castoff from her mother. Maveen never would have chosen a light solid that showed the dirt, not with a child. But Officer Siegel didn’t seem to notice. He sat between Maveen and Devlin as if he spent every night here, waiting for the ten o’clock news to come on.

“You always, always find them?” Maveen asked.

“Always. I can’t remember a single case where a child truly went missing for more than a few hours.”

She caught that truly. He was still accusing. Everyone was judging them all the time.

The news finally came. Maveen felt a weird burst of pride to see her baby’s photo up there, the second story of the evening, and Devlin smiled in a fond way that he seldom did when Brittany was here. You didn’t have to be rich or famous for your missing baby to matter. A lost child was a lost child. That’s what made the U.S. of A. a great country. And Brittany was so beautiful, people couldn’t help taking extra notice, Maveen thought. It had killed Maveen’s parents when she had taken up with Byron, but who could argue with the result? Brittany had skin the color of a coffee that was half cream, ringlets just a shade darker, and green eyes with lashes so long you’d swear she was wearing false ones. She was delicious looking. Even other children wanted to pinch her cheeks, stroke her hair.

The telephone rang before the last notes of the newscast’s theme song had bounced away. Maveen jumped on it, only to hear another officer, Donald something, tell her to put Officer Siegel on the phone. Reluctantly she turned over the phone, feeling a strange sensation, as if a moth or a bug was trapped in her throat.

“What’s wrong?” she demanded when he hung up the phone. “Something’s wrong, I can tell. What did he say? What’s going on?”

Crazily, the thought ran through her head that she should beat on his chest with her fists, the way women do in the movies, only to have men grab their wrists and kiss them. It wasn’t that she wanted to kiss this cop, who didn’t appeal to her at all. But if she started acting like it was a movie, maybe it would end like a movie, with everyone safe and happy.

“Nothing’s wrong, exactly,” he began, licking his lips. “The thing to consider is that it’s a lead, and leads are good. Assuming…if…Ms. Little, did you mention what Brittany was wearing today?”

“I told you and told you. She had on a sundress, denim with white stitching at the pockets, and white tennis.”

“And she was toilet trained?”

“Sort of. She was wearing pull-ups.” Officer Siegel looked confused. “For when she forgot.”

Brittany had been forgetting a lot lately, ever since Devlin came to live with them, but Maveen didn’t see any reason to tell the officer that.

“It’s just that”-he put his hand on her shoulder, and Maveen flinched as if someone had hit her, as if a two-by-four had fallen on her-“the custodian at the mall was doing the bathrooms and he found something in the trash. It was a denim jumper-”

Maveen broke down so completely that the officer didn’t finish his piece. He let her collapse, crying, into Devlin’s arms, standing awkwardly to the side. It was left to the homicide detectives, who arrived within the hour, to decide if they wanted to tell the still-sobbing mother about the shorn hair at the bottom of the wastebasket and the blood-soaked T-shirt that was on its way to the lab for testing.