Every Secret Thing

Saturday, July 4
16.

The elevators in the Baltimore County Public Safety Building were famously slow, so all but the laziest workers had an informal rule known as “one floor up and two floors down.” Nancy, however, always checked the elevator bays before ducking into the stairwells. You never knew when the commissioner or a major might be waiting there, or a detective with whom she needed to compare notes. This was the kind of thing she had learned from her uncle Stan, who had been known as the thirty-three-thirty-three lieutenant, for he had attained that rank at the age of thirty-three and advanced no higher until his retirement thirty-three years later.

But there was zero expectation of a useful chance encounter on a Saturday morning, especially over a holiday weekend, so Nancy went straight for the stairs, almost running the steps from the tenth floor, home of Homicide, to the eleventh, which housed the crime lab. The eleventh was the top floor, and the lab was there for a practical reason: the placement reduced the building’s exposure to damage if the lab’s contents ever exploded. Nancy had found this possibility ludicrous when she first joined the department, but it no longer seemed so. Everything was possible now.

“I didn’t know you were working this case,” said the lab tech, Holly Varitek. “Isn’t it awfully fast for you to be up again?”

Nancy shrugged, determined not to bitch. Infante had thrown a tantrum when Lenhardt changed the rotation on them last night, following the sergeant into the men’s room to plead his case. Infante had planned to drive out to Deep Creek Lake with the redheaded barmaid, Charlotte something. He had slammed out, and been curt to Nancy the rest of the night. Guys could get away with being bratty. Nancy had to be stoic. She even had to be stoic about being stoic.

“Well, at least your snatcher was considerate,” said Holly, a chatty type inclined to fill silences. Brisk and wide-eyed, with shiny dark hair and vivid coloring, Holly was one of those people who seemed to be put together with higher quality parts than everyone else. Even her metabolism was better than the average person’s, for she could eat anything she wanted and not get fat. Nancy couldn’t help noticing that.

“Considerate how?”

“Well, first of all he-you’re assuming a he, right, given that the stuff was found in the men’s room-left the girl’s hair with the jumper. It’s like he wanted to make it easy for us to compare the DNA if the blood didn’t match. Of course, we still needed the mother’s sample, for control, because you wouldn’t want to assume the pile of hair is the girl’s hair. You see-”

“I know,” Nancy said, trying not to let her impatience show. The people with technical expertise-the lab techs, the M.E.’s, even those who conducted ballistic analysis-were all a little in love with their knowledge, like eleven-year-old boys who had just learned some basic fact of science or math and had to bore the rest of the world with it. “Do we have a match on the blood or not?”

Holly’s easygoing temperament made her impossible to offend. “The spots on the jumper are definitely blood, but it’s not the missing girl’s, or the mother’s. No match. It does, however, match this man’s T-shirt, which was balled up in the same trash can and had a lot more blood on it.”

“Huh.” Nancy slumped against the counter, thinking. It struck her as a backward break, the kind of information that widened the investigation for now, but could narrow it later, with luck. The blood on the jumper was probably the kidnapper’s, although it wasn’t 100 percent. If they made an arrest, they’d have a key piece of physical evidence.

The only problem was how were they going to make an arrest? The biggest break in the case would be the saddest one as well-the discovery of a body, which might yield more clues than the men’s room at Westview Mall. Nancy had barely slept last night, wondering if the girl might still be alive. She so wanted her to be alive. The case had been given to Homicide because of the large amount of blood on the T-shirt, but now they knew it wasn’t the girl’s blood, so it was a not unreasonable hope.

“Does it seem weird to you,” Nancy asked the lab tech, “that the blood is on the front of the jumper?”

Holly shrugged. “Not particularly. Someone was bleeding heavily. A head wound could have dripped. Then again, the bloody T-shirt could have nothing to do with the jumper, could have stained it when someone tossed it in the trash.”

“But if you were standing behind a child, cutting hair-” Nancy mimed the motion more for herself than Holly, and finished the thought in her head. It would be hard to cut oneself that severely with a pair of scissors, harder still to drip just a few drops of blood on the girl’s jumper while leaking blood all over a T-shirt. But if the kidnapper were standing in front-she acted out that scenario, too. No, it didn’t make sense. Perhaps the blood had fallen on the jumper after it was removed. Or, worse luck, maybe Holly was right, and the blood-soaked T-shirt had landed in the trash after the jumper, staining it by accident. Nancy could imagine some homeless man reaching into the garbage can to find a rag to stanch a wound.

Had the child reached out and scratched the person who was cutting her hair? Children didn’t like haircuts, or so Nancy had heard from her cousins with kids. But you could hardly call this a haircut. Based on the thick coil of hair found in the trash can, the kidnapper had sliced the hair just below the elastic band that held Brittany Little’s ponytail. The act had been swift, with little attempt to shape or style the hair left on the girl’s head.

Nancy carried the news, such as it was, back downstairs to Infante, who was cursing his luck at being the primary on this case. Not only was the disappearance of Brittany Little not a dunker or a gimme, it was going to attract press attention once the details began to shake loose. The department had managed to stall the press on Friday with the usual wink-wink, nudge-nudge signals. A few years back, there had been a rash of what Lenhardt called six-hour kidnappings. Teen girls in the city, girls who were apparently too impatient to take the nine months necessary to have their own babies, had started grabbing other people’s children as if they were dolls left untended. But it’s hard to steal a baby without drawing attention to yourself if you’re a teenage girl living with your own family, so those cases were always wrapped up in a matter of hours. “Easier to hide a pregnancy than a child,” Lenhardt sometimes said, usually when they were trying to track down a girl who had left her own baby in a Dumpster.

The rash of six-hour kidnappings had been during the spring, seven years ago. The city cops had thought Olivia Barnes was one of those cases, Nancy recalled, at least in the beginning. There had been a baby-sitter, a heavyset, dimwitted girl whose story hadn’t tracked. Another seventy-two hours passed before they asked the academy class to search Leakin Park. Even then, they had thought it was more of a field exercise for the cadets than a mission that would yield results.

“Stranger blood, huh?” Infante echoed when Nancy told him what she had learned on the eleventh floor. “Now, if I were a lucky guy, it would match the boyfriend.”

“I thought they both came up pretty clean. No Social Services file, no neighbor complaints, no record of 911 calls to the address.” When a parent-or a parent’s partner-killed a child, there were usually a few practice runs.

“Yeah, other than an assault charge on her and a weapons charge on him, they’re the nicest young couple since Mary and Joseph. But it’s the only thing that makes sense. Boyfriend goes too far administering discipline, he and panicky girlfriend concoct a cover-up. Who grabs a little girl from Value City? That’s not exactly the best place to find the next Lindbergh baby. You just know it ain’t going to be a big payday.”

“Yeah, for that you gotta go to Ethan Allen, maybe Crate & Barrel.”

Infante laughed. “You’re such a secret smart-ass. If Lenhardt knew half the shit you said-”

“Did you check for sex perverts in that part of the county? Could be a Peeping Tom or a groper who’s worked his way up to the next level.”

“No one jumped out of the computer. The most likely ones are locked up.”

“Biological father?”

“He’s also locked up, in Worcester, Massachusetts.”

Nancy picked up the photo of the girl off Infante’s desk. Such beautiful, beautiful hair, thick and shiny even under the cheap studio lights. It had been slicked back for the photo, but those baby ears could barely hold that cascading mane. Her ears were pierced, Nancy noticed, which she thought barbaric on children. “What about the scissors?”

“What do you mean?”

“You saw the hair. It was shorn, not hacked off with a pen knife. Do you carry scissors on you? Real scissors, not Swiss Army knife ones? Because that’s what it’s going to take to go through a hank of hair like that.”

“So either the guy is walking around with a pair of scissors-”

“Or bought a pair after identifying his target. We should check the CVS, Jo-Ann’s Fabrics, every store in the mall that sells scissors. Everybody’s got computerized inventory, right? So we should know who sold scissors yesterday at what time. We also might want to see who bought clothes for a toddler at Westview yesterday. Because he didn’t take her out of there naked, or just in a pair of pull-ups.”

Infante wagged an approving finger. “I like you, Porter.”

“That can be our secret.”

Infante opened a crisscross directory and began compiling a list of stores in Westview Mall. He didn’t have to tell Nancy that they would visit the stores in person. They did their job face-to-face, showing badge and ID. No one worth talking to ever volunteered anything over the telephone.

Nancy kept staring at the photo, the original they had used to make the dupes for the television stations and the newspaper. It was a Kmart special, or one of those mall photo studios, the girl backed by a field of fake flowers. Nancy should stick it in an envelope now, make sure it got back to the mother as soon as possible. How horrible it would be if the photo arrived after the fact-assuming the fact turned out to be the worst possible fact of all. That was the assumption, despite the hair and the discarded clothes. There was no getting past the blood on the T-shirt, even if it wasn’t the girl’s. Something had happened in that rest room.

It was funny about the photo, how it had been played in the media. As usual, the Beacon-Light had demanded the most from the department and given the least. They had even tried to persuade Nancy to drive the photo to the downtown office last night, arguing that it would mean overtime if a reporter had to act as the courier. As if Nancy cared about their overtime. The paper had ended up sending a young reporter from the county bureau. But because the department was noncommittal about the nature of the girl’s disappearance, the paper hadn’t used the photo at all. Clearly, some Beacon-Light editor had run the available information through his formula for news and decided it didn’t qualify. Because the girl’s parents were poor? Because the girl was biracial? It was hard to understand how newspapers thought. Television was better for this stuff, anyway. Played it high, got results. People watched television.

Plus, television kept the missing girl in play all day long, while the newspaper was a one-shot deal at best. Every local station had shown the photo on the ten and eleven o’clock newscasts and were now using it on their Saturday morning news shows every half hour. Nancy could tell how often the morning television shows were cycling by the pattern of the phone calls. The girl’s picture would pop up on Channel 2 or 11 or 13-just the picture, and an explanation that she had been missing since she “wandered off” in Westview Friday evening-and a few minutes later the phone would ring the double staccato chime that indicated it was being forwarded from the 911 communications center. The public didn’t realize it, but the department gave out a seven-digit exchange for the com center in such cases, which meant that everyone who called ended up on the Caller ID log. So far, every tipster had been a lunatic. But it only took one, as Lenhardt liked to say. It only took one.

The phone rang just then, almost as if Nancy had willed it.

“Nancy Porter?”

“Yes?” This was odd. Her name wasn’t out there in connection with the case. Only Bonnie, the corporal, had gone on camera.

The woman on the line quickly answered the unspoken question. “I just spoke to your sergeant and he said I should speak to you. I have…information.”

Nancy sat at her desk, working her notepad from her purse, digging out a pen. “Can I ask your name?”

The caller ignored that question, racing ahead, eager to say her piece. “There is something I think you should know about the missing girl, Detective Porter. Something you would not be expected to know, but something I cannot help knowing. When you have this piece of information, I think it will change the way you are pursuing this matter.”

Jesus, Nancy thought, has this tight-ass woman ever heard of contractions?

“This is information that might not be meaningful to you, but it is meaningful to me, and it should be meaningful to you. It will be meaningful to you if you pay careful attention-”

Holy Christ. How had this one gotten past Lenhardt? She was clearly a well-intentioned wacko, some shut-in who yearned to find her place in the world by pretending to knowledge she didn’t have. Was Lenhardt playing a joke on Nancy or testing her?

“If you could get to the point, ma’am,” Nancy said as gently as possible.

“This is the way I get to the point,” the caller snapped. “My name is Cynthia Poole Barnes. And you will listen to me. You will absolutely listen to me, and everything I have to say.”

17.

Cynthia had awakened that morning to the sound of a familiar song, one she heard almost every day now, at least twice a day. “I know you…” Rosalind was watching Sleeping Beauty again. She had watched it every day this summer until Cynthia had been forced to put her on a schedule-once in the morning, once in the afternoon, with no other television at all. She had thought that once Rosalind understood it was a choice between Sleeping Beauty and the rest of the television-video universe, she would choose to watch other things. But Rosalind was a monotheist straight from the womb. She wanted one toy, a stuffed bear, and one book, Grimm’s Fairy Tales. She also needed only one parent, but given that it was Mommy, Cynthia didn’t mind that so much.

And now Rosalind wanted this white-blond princess waltzing in the forest over and over again. The end of the film, which scared Cynthia to this day, did not intimidate Rosalind at all. The thorns grew over the castle, the dragon’s shadow filled the screen, yet Rosalind’s gaze remained locked on the set, unflinching and unwavering. She could watch without fear because she knew how it ended. She was equally blasé about the terrors in Grimm, whether it was Cinderella’s stepsisters mutilating their feet, or Rumpelstiltskin tearing himself in half from fury when the Queen guessed his name.

Cynthia looked at the clock-it was seven-thirty. Warren would be up and dressed, anxious to go to his golf game, but determined not to disturb Cynthia while she slept. She slipped on her robe and went downstairs, giving him permission to escape into the summer morning. There was something about her husband in golf clothes that made her want to cry, a combination of pride and irrelevance she could never explain. It had mattered so much, once upon a time, to get into Caves Valley. Then it mattered not at all.

Warren knew it, too, felt the loss as deeply as she did. She never doubted his grief, never claimed hers was any larger than his. But only one of them could withdraw from the world, and he had granted Cynthia that privilege. Warren still worked, and part of his work meant playing golf on Saturday mornings, putting on his spikes and his cheerful-lawyer face, heading out to oil the relationships that brought a steady stream of work into the firm. Cynthia would be the first to tell anyone who dared to ask that Warren, in some ways, had it harder than she did.

The thing was, no one ever dared to ask.

Yet he always felt guilty about leaving her on Saturday mornings, always looked abashed. Which was good, for it kept him from realizing on this particular Saturday how much she wanted to be alone. Cynthia didn’t want Warren around when she called the police.

But she wouldn’t call for several hours. To call so early would seem hysterical, suspect. She would wait until the local news stations had shown the photo again and again. And then she would call, feigning ignorance, pretending not to know or care who was assigned to the investigation under way.

It had taken Cynthia’s father less than an hour last night to put her in touch with Sergeant Lenhardt, who was still in the office at midnight, although he had sent his detectives home to prepare for the long day ahead, a day of interviews and field work, even if it was the Fourth of July. He had treated Cynthia with respect and kindness-she was the daughter of Judge Poole-and encouraged her to call the detectives directly.

“Nancy Porter,” he said. “Or Kevin Infante, who’s the primary on the case. But if you’d rather deal with Nancy -well, that’s okay.”

“And why would I rather deal with Nancy?” She knew, of course. Some things are never forgotten. But she was curious whether this sergeant knew as well. Cynthia had a weakness for wanting to know how much others knew about her, the strange attraction-repulsion that gossips, even reformed ones, often feel toward gossip. She dreaded the idea that people might be talking about her. She dreaded the idea that they weren’t.

“I don’t know,” the cautious sergeant said, leaving a space for her to fill, if she so chose. When Cynthia volunteered nothing, he added: “Women like talking to women sometimes, in my experience. They’re both good detectives, they’ll hear you out. They’ll want to know what you know.”

“Why don’t you tell them what I’ve told you? Why do I need to call them at all?”

Now it was his turn to be evasive, to wait out a silence. But the seconds ticked by, with neither speaking, and it was the sergeant who finally broke.

“If you call Nancy-or Detective Infante-then it’s a lead they’ve developed. If it comes from me, they’ll feel second-guessed.”

Plausible, Cynthia thought. But the very fact that she found it “plausible” marked it for the half-truth it probably was. The sergeant wasn’t telling her everything. Which was only fair, as she had not told him close to everything.

So she sat in her kitchen on Saturday, waiting for the morning hours to tick by, waiting for Sleeping Beauty to follow the arc of her destiny, from privileged birth to a date with a spindle to the deathlike sleep from which only true love could wake her. She heard all this because the nursery was still equipped with a baby monitor, which was on all the time. If only Tanika, upstairs on the phone, had remembered to turn it on that day, as Cynthia thought of it. That day, the only day. If only Tanika, hearing the phone ring, had remembered there was one in the kitchen, hadn’t dashed up the stairs to grab the extension in Cynthia’s room. If only she had remembered on which side of the door she had parked the carriage-or hadn’t lied about it later, hadn’t sworn to the skies that Olivia was inside the house, behind the latched screen door. The girl’s clumsy lies, told to cover up her mistakes, had only slowed down the investigation and sent detectives scrambling in the wrong direction.

Cynthia made a pot of coffee, transferred it to a carafe that sat on a ceramic trivet. Italy, she thought. Our honeymoon. Whenever she thought about Tanika-stretched out on Cynthia’s bed, chatting to her boyfriend, shoes leaving black marks on the spread-she always ended up in Italy, on her honeymoon.

Why are you going to Italy, people-well, her parents’ friends-had asked the young couple. Why not Hawaii? Why not Jamaica? Go someplace you won’t work so hard. Why Italy?

“For the shoes,” Cynthia drawled.

People had laughed as she knew they would. “Oh, but you’ll want to see Rome, of course, and Venice, and Tuscany if you have time,” they advised. Cynthia had put a cautionary hand on the arm of such well-intentioned travel guides, and repeated slowly, as if they were hard of hearing, and some of them were: “Yes, that’s all very nice. But I’m going for the shoes.”

No one had believed her, of course. That was one of the advantages of exaggerating one’s own persona. No one ever quite believed that Cynthia was as vain or self-centered as she insisted she was. Perhaps she wasn’t. They may have gone for the shoes, as she later told her friends, but they ended up doing the whole damn boot, from toe to top. They had done it on an unofficial one-for-Warren, two-for-Cynthia basis. This was the model on which their marriage would be based, and it had worked pretty well, up until that day when nothing worked anymore, except inertia and this shared grief, a grief so profound that it would defeat anyone who tried to carry it alone.

In Italy, Cynthia had been surprised to learn that Warren was a dutiful, earnest tourist. It was the first unexpected bit of knowledge in her marriage, and while not unwelcome, it made her wonder just how observant she was. She had seen herself as a conqueror, winning an impossible prize over a large field, yet Warren-the-tourist-guidebook in hand-had ventured dangerously close to geeky. In hindsight, Cynthia realized she should have known that a man as successful and handsome as Warren should have had a little more dog in him. But the face, the shoulders, turned out to be fairly late developments in the life of a bookish little nerd. Growing up in Pittsburgh, Warren had been a grade-grubber whose asthma kept him out of sports, while his strong-willed single mother kept him off the streets lest he be tempted into more unsuitable extracurriculars. Egypt had caught his fancy and led him to a more general appreciation of archaeology. His idea for their honeymoon, broached with the tentativeness of a man already used to his ideas being rejected out of hand, was a dig in Central America, where you paid money for the privilege of sifting through dirt in some maybe-temple. Cynthia had gotten a lot of mileage out of that story.

Still, she would never have denied him his day in Pompeii. She didn’t accompany him-she had stayed in the hotel, writing thank-you notes to her mother’s friends, who would be quick to let Judge and Mrs. Poole know if Cynthia was tardy on this task-but she had paged through the books he brought back. And wished she hadn’t. There was one image she could never shake, an image that came back to her unbidden, time and again. She had seen it when her cell phone rang on July 17, seven years ago. And she saw it last night, about 10:02 P.M., when Brittany Little’s image flashed on her television screen.

It was odd that she had seen the news at all, for Cynthia’s family treated Cynthia like the Sleeping Beauty, trying to shield her from certain things. Only instead of spindles, it was missing children that Cynthia was not allowed to contemplate. For seven years, newspapers had been hidden and television shows muted, lest Cynthia hear about another missing or dead child.

The thing that no one understood was that she didn’t care about any child but her own, and never would.

Finally, 11 A.M., her self-imposed deadline, arrived. She dialed the number the sergeant had given her, and asked to speak to Nancy Porter. She thought she heard a catch in the girl’s voice when she revealed her name, an invitation to speak of their shared history. But she hurried by it, into the present. Nancy Porter was nothing to her. For reasons Cynthia could never quite fathom, she felt shamed in front of the girl, as if the detective had something on her.

“As you may recall, my own daughter was taken almost seven years ago,” she told the detective.

“I remember the case,” the detective said, but she didn’t volunteer anything more.

“Yes. And as you probably recall, she was missing for several days before she was…found.” Cynthia paused, wondering if she needed to add a word to that sentence. Dead. My baby was found dead. To this day, she hated to say it so plainly. It wasn’t the starkness of the word that bothered Cynthia, it was its simplicity. Dead did not begin to encompass what had happened to her child. Dead ended.

“I know,” the detective all but whispered.

“They’re home, you know. Within the past few weeks. They’re home, back in Southwest Baltimore, not even three miles from where this happened.”

“Do you have any specific information that links them to this case?”

“They’re home. What more do you need to know?”

“Well, but-in some ways, the two…disappearances are very different. Your daughter was an infant, this girl is a toddler. Your child was taken on impulse, this seems to be part of a more calculated plan, with clothes being swapped-”

“You want information? You want similarities? Well, here it is. The little girl who was taken-” She groped for the name, which had not registered.

“ Brittany Little.”

“Yes. Brittany Little. Well, Brittany Little has long curly hair and café-au-lait skin. Brittany Little is, in fact, a dead-ringer for my three-year-old, who’s sitting upstairs right now. But I can’t help wondering if that might be different, if these girls weren’t so inept.”

“You have another daughter?” The detective’s voice was surprised, almost awed.

“Yes. And I’d like this one to live. I’d like Brittany Little to live, too.” The sentiment was a split-second late. Of course she wanted the child to be found unharmed. She wouldn’t volunteer anyone for what had happened to her.

But what Cynthia really wanted was for Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller to be held accountable at last.

“Do the girls know about your new child? Have they threatened your family in any way, or made any attempts to contact you?”

“This is not a time for questions.” Cynthia had lost all patience and was, for a moment, the woman she used to be-a boss, a supervisor, a political operative, a person who gave orders and saw them carried out. “Don’t sit there blabbing to me. Who knows why they do what they do, then or now. Who cares anything about their motives? They waited, last time. Remember? They waited four days. If you arrest them now, maybe they won’t do what they did last time. Maybe they won’t kill another child.”

“Mrs. Barnes-”

“You will talk to them.” It was at once a question and a command.

“I’m not at liberty to discuss our investigation.”

Cynthia did not allow any tentativeness to seep into her voice this time. “You will talk to them.”

“Yes.” The detective’s voice was almost a whisper. “God, yes. Of course we’ll talk to them.”

Cynthia Barnes hung up the phone and poured herself another cup of coffee. The trivet took her to Italy, Italy took her to Pompeii, and Pompeii always brought her back to the place where the world ended, which happened to be on Oliver Street in East Baltimore, on July 17, seven years ago.

She had been on a corner in East Baltimore because the mayor, who loved to dress up, had put on a garbageman’s uniform and gone out with a trash crew to one of those neighborhoods that was always bellyaching about how neglected it was by the mayor’s administration. Normally, Cynthia wouldn’t have been there at all, but there was an out-of-town reporter following the mayor, and she wanted to keep an eye on things.

While she was baby-sitting the mayor, Tanika, a nineteen-year-old Coppin student, was baby-sitting Olivia. The girl had just started with the Barnes family a month before. Dutiful and dull, she had been hired for her seeming lack of interest in boys and clothes, and-more crucially-boys’ seeming lack of interest in her. Who could have known that she already had a boyfriend, a demigangster she was forbidden to see at home, who called her at the Barnes house every hour of the day? Who could guess that he would call just as she pushed Olivia’s carriage out on the front walk and that she would run back inside to take the call, thinking it would require no more than a minute of her time? And who could guess that Tanika, terrified of her reverend father’s knowing of her disobedience, would fritter away five, ten, fifteen, thirty, sixty, ninety precious minutes trying to find Olivia on her own? Ninety minutes were lost by the time she dared to call Cynthia on her cell. Ninety minutes gone, then four days gone, and finally, a lifetime.

But at the corner of Oliver and Montford, seven years ago, Cynthia knew none of this. She knew only that the baby-sitter was on the phone, trying to relay the impossible news that Olivia was missing. At that moment, Cynthia was still fighting, still struggling, still convinced she could do something-and that’s when she remembered the image from Warren’s guidebook, the one that had turned her stomach. It had been a photo of a dog, lashed to a post, preserved in the moment of his struggle. Twisted, writhing, he fought against the molten lava and the ash, determined not to die. For some reason, the dog seemed more conscious of his fate than all the humans of Pompeii combined. They stood still. The dog fought back.

“What’s wrong?” asked her summer intern, a bright young thing named Lisa Bell, who had styled herself after her boss until she was known as Cynthia-ette, or sometimes just Junior. “What’s wrong, Cynthia?”

It happened that the photographer who was traveling with the out-of-town reporter caught the mayor in the pose she wanted at the exact moment Cynthia snapped her cell phone shut. The photo captured the mayor in the foreground, grinning as he lifted a can onto the back of the truck. But if one squinted closely, there was Cynthia in the background, preserved in ash, another dog in Pompeii.

Now, on this July morning, she felt the first real stirrings of life she had known in ages. Not even Rosalind, turning somersaults on the sonogram, had made Cynthia feel this vital, this necessary. Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller weren’t through with her yet? Well, Cynthia Barnes was just getting started, too.

18.

Helen Manning had just gotten up when the detectives arrived on her doorstep. She recognized they were detectives before they announced themselves and she pulled the sash tighter on her robe, although it was already quite tight. It was not her state of dress that made her feel shy and tentative before this dark man and fair, apple-cheeked girl. It was more as if they could see right through her, to the source of whatever mistakes she had made. Yet even as the silk-slippery sash cut into her narrow waist, she realized she was not at all surprised. It had taken years, but the second shoe had finally dropped.

“I’m Kevin Infante,” said the male detective, who had the kind of Mediterranean good looks to which Helen was once partial. She found herself patting her hair, running her fingertips across her neck as if she might be able to erase the beaded lines that had come to rest there, like those wispy necklaces favored by young girls. “And this is my partner, Nancy Porter.”

“We were hoping to talk to your-to Alice Manning,” the girl said. Although plump, she struck Helen as everything Alice had once yearned to be-unthreatening, agreeable, popular. Miss Congeniality. The class secretary but never the class president. Alice probably hadn’t broken the habit of wanting those things, poor thing.

“She’s not here. She’s…out.”

“Do you know where she is, or when she might be home?”

“May I ask what this is about?” Helen’s voice squeaked a little.

“We just want to talk to her,” the female detective repeated with a firm, unyielding tone. “Nothing more.”

“I think she took a walk.”

“A walk?”

“She walks a lot.” God, she must look like a terrible mother, standing here with her morning hair, in this decadent silk robe, like some madam in an old Storeyville brothel. All she needed to complete the picture was a bare-chested man at her kitchen table, reeking of sex and screaming for his breakfast. But Jesus, Alice was eighteen, a grown-up under the law. Was Helen to be held to a different standard because of the past? How many women could produce their eighteen-year-old children on a Saturday afternoon? It’s 1:30P.M., do you know where your children are? Helen had always thought the old public service announcement was more for children than for adults, for she had never felt safer than when she was curled up on the sofa in her family’s den, hearing that rhetorical question just before the nightly newscast. Her parents knew where she was. She knew where her parents were. All was right with the world.

“Does she have a cell phone? Or a job where we might find her?”

“You know, I’ve encouraged her to get a job.” Helen felt relief at being able to tell that small truth. “She says she’s looking. That’s probably what she’s doing today, following up on some leads.”

“Do you know where?”

“Well, no.” Helen tried to remember what they had discussed, specifically. “Not the grocery stores, because they’re union. And not the convenience stores. They’re not safe. I mean, don’t you agree? You wouldn’t want to have a daughter working in a convenience store, would you?”

She was flirting, she realized, setting up the male detective to tell her that, no, he didn’t have a daughter, wasn’t even married, in fact. Maybe he would scrawl his home number on his business card, or ask with fake nonchalance if there was a Mr. Manning.

But it was the girl who pulled out a card and handed it to Helen.

“Would you call us when she comes home? We just need to talk to her. Nothing formal. May have more to do with one of her friends than her.”

“ Alice has a friend?” Helen could not bear the idiocy of her own voice, this stupid, echoing, out-of-it quality, as if she were some Judy Holliday type. She never sounded this way, never. “I mean, she seems to keep to herself, as far as I know.”

“When did she get home?” the female detective asked.

Until that moment, Helen had been trying to cling to the idea that this was all a coincidence, that there was no link between present and past. Damn it, Alice, she thought, suddenly furious with her daughter. She had been given every chance to start over-second chances, third chances, even. But she would rather keep punishing Helen than take advantage of her opportunities.

“Last night,” the young woman prompted. “What time did she get home last night?”

“Do I have to talk to you?”

“No,” the male detective said. “But why wouldn’t you?”

“I can think,” Helen said, “of no shortage of reasons. For one thing-you still haven’t told me what this is about.”

“Well, it’s not really about anything. We’re working on a case, your daughter may be able to help us. That’s all.”

Ah, these were the police Helen remembered, in their most unhelpful guise. They were always so maddeningly elliptical, so noncommittal. Taciturn, reserved, insisting you were on a need-to-know basis even as they began destroying your life. Do you recognize this, Ms. Manning? Have you seen this before, Ms. Manning? The question had come before she could focus on the this in question. That detective had been middle-aged, thick-middled, and reeking of tobacco. She remembered still that she had not specifically requested “Ms.” and the presumption had irked her. She refused to look at the bagged object in their hands, eager to disavow it, even though she knew she could not.

After all, Alice ’s name was written on the bottom of the metal box in firm purple marker. Alice wrote her name on everything-toys, books, notebooks. Once, she had even scratched her initials on the back of a locket with her name engraved on the front. “Because it says Alice, not Alice Manning,” she had told Helen at the time. “So another Alice could take it.” Alice had worried a lot about phantom Alices, little ghost girls intent on stealing everything she had. She wrote her full name everywhere she could, including even her despised middle name to be on the safe side. Alice Lucille Manning, Alice Lucille Manning, Alice Lucille Manning, ALICE LUCILLE MANNING. “Did you name me for Lucille Ball?” she asked Helen once. “No, for my mother’s mother.” “Oh,” Alice said. “Well, can I tell people that you named me for Lucille Ball, like she was a distant relation?”

At least these detectives were empty-handed, a reprieve of sorts. Maybe it really was an innocent coincidence, a traffic accident seen, a robbery witnessed, nothing more. “I don’t know when she’ll be home,” Helen told them. “But she’s always home for dinner. Especially Saturdays. We have pizza on Saturdays.”

The female detective’s parting glance was pitying. Helen didn’t mind. Pity was the least she deserved.

The afternoon sun created a powerful glare on the parking lot at Westview, so Ronnie did not notice the man and woman walking purposefully toward the bagel shop until they were inside. But once she could see them, she knew they were officials of some sort, on business. Health Department? Not on a Saturday, and not with guns on their belts. Mall security? Those guys wore uniforms and didn’t come in pairs. No, these were cops.

“Ronnie Fuller?” the woman asked. She looked familiar for some reason, yet Ronnie didn’t know her. Maybe she just had one of those faces.

“Yeah.”

“We need to talk to you, if we could.”

Ronnie was aware of Clarice listening, although her back was turned. “I’m five minutes from taking a break. Could this wait until then? I’ll meet you outside.”

“Sure.”

The police officers didn’t go outside. They grabbed a pair of sodas from the case and seated themselves at one of the round tables, so they were facing Ronnie, watching her. They talked in low, casual voices, but one of them was always looking at her, sometimes both. And with Clarice now stealing looks at her, too, Ronnie couldn’t help feeling nervous. It had been a long time since so many people had looked at her at once.

The five minutes passed slowly, a fact that Ronnie registered as odd. Given that she didn’t want to talk to them, the minute hand on the big Coca-Cola clock should have shot forward five spaces in a matter of seconds. But the time dragged. She waited on a few more customers, teenage girls. Wait, she was a teenage girl, too. She forgot that sometimes. She felt like she had more in common with Clarice than she did with the girls on the other side of the counter. They compared calluses, the ones they got from standing, and talked about how their legs ached at the end of the day.

“You take your break,” Clarice said at last. “I can watch the cash register, slow as it is.”

She seemed to be trying to say something else with her kind brown eyes, but what? Was she disappointed in Ronnie because police officers had come to talk to her? She would be even more disappointed if she knew about Ronnie’s past. Would she let Ronnie continue to work here? Probably not. Even if she did, she wouldn’t be Ronnie’s friend anymore. She would treat her with the cold, polite reserve that she used on the customers. When the teenage girls had stood in front of the counter, giggling and changing their orders back and forth, Ronnie could feel Clarice’s dislike for them. White, silly, self-important, foolish. She would die if Clarice treated her that way.

But if Clarice found out about Olivia Barnes, she would think Ronnie was one of those white people who hated black people. That had been another one of the lies told by Maddy’s mom. Of all the things that Ronnie had done, or been accused of doing, this detail remained so sharp. She had said a horrible word, the one word you could never take back. That was why most people believed Alice over her, when it came down to it. Alice had never said the horrible word.

“I just have to go in the back,” she told the detectives, “and hang up my apron. We’re not allowed to wear them on break. It has something to do with the Health Department.”

Clarice probably gave her an odd look at that, knowing it for the lie it was, but Ronnie didn’t care. She pushed her way back into the kitchen, where O’lene was studying the ovens.

“Hey, Ronnie,” she said, “do I have to put in a new batch of anything? Or can we make it to three P.M. with what we’ve got?”

“What we’ve got,” Ronnie said tonelessly. She folded her apron, put it on top of one of the boxes, and opened the back door, the one used for delivery.

“Hey, what the-”

But she was already out of O’lene’s earshot, running blindly toward Route 40. She didn’t know where she was going to go, or what she was going to do. The only thing she knew was that when they came for you, their minds were already made up. So you might as well run, and be free for a few hours longer. You might as well run.

It was just before 6 P.M. when Alice let herself into the house, blinking violently. Helen didn’t approve of air-conditioning-that was her exact word, approve, as if it were an idea, or a habit-and she kept the house dark and shuttered in the summertime. It worked, actually, and the living room was surprisingly pleasant. But the abrupt change in light was hard on Alice ’s eyes. She swore she could actually feel her irises opening, desperate to find enough light to focus in the dim room.

Then she saw Helen, sitting in an old easy chair unearthed from the Salvation Army and covered in a bright flowery print that Helen had raved about. Marimekko, Alice recalled. “I had dresses made out of this when I was your age,” Helen had said. Now she sat in the chair, still in her robe, although it was almost dinnertime.

“Some people came looking for you.”

“People?”

“Police detectives.”

“What did they want?”

“They want to talk to you.”

“Why?”

“They wouldn’t tell me. Why don’t you?”

“How can I tell you what I don’t know?”

“Are you sure you don’t know?”

“Of course I’m sure.” Alice lowered herself onto the sofa, removed her shoes, and examined the soles of her feet. She had been using a special cream on her heels, but they were still cracked and split from her rambling, as she had come to think of her long walks. She wished she knew someone other than Helen who might ask what she was up to these days, because she would like to use that answer: “Me? Oh, I’ve been rambling.” It sounded romantic.

“ Alice -I can’t go through this again.”

“What?”

“You know.”

Alice did, but she wanted Helen to say it. “I don’t have a clue what you mean.”

“ Alice, baby.”

“Don’t call me baby.”

“You are my baby. My one and only. You will always be my baby.”

“Right,” Alice said, with a short bark of a laugh. “Right.”

“Why would the police want to talk to you?”

“I told you, I don’t know. But I guess there’s only one way to find out.”

She held out her hand, weary in a way she hadn’t been coming up the walk. Then she had felt energized, despite her long day of rambling. She had been thinking about their Saturday night pizza, which Helen insisted on ordering from one of those gourmet places that served pizza with things like shrimp and chicken fajitas and even stuffed grape leaves. Alice would have been happy with a plain cheese from Domino’s. Instead, she usually ordered something called a “margherita,” which was just tomato-and-cheese in disguise. So Helen. She kept giving ordinary things the most extraordinary names. A tomato-and-cheese pizza became margherita, a piece of fabric was Marimekko.

Helen stared, perplexed, at Alice ’s outstretched hand.

“They gave you a card, right? Well, give it to me.”

Helen fished it out of her robe pocket and handed it over. Nancy Porter. Baltimore County Homicide.

“Are you going to call?” Helen asked, as if Alice were the adult, the one who got to make decisions.

“After dinner. It’s pizza night, remember?”

“They might have gone home by then.”

“Then I’ll talk to them Monday.”

“But-”

“If it’s important to them, they’ll come back,” Alice said, going into the kitchen to grab the carryout menu from beneath the refrigerator magnet shaped like Glinda the Good. Even though she knew the menu and the phone number by heart, she liked to study it before ordering, just in case she decided to try something other than her usual. “They always come back.”

19.

Nancy and Infante managed to make good use of their time that afternoon-canvassing the mall’s shops, looking for anyone who might have sold scissors or a new outfit for a toddler. The people they interviewed were all helpful, too, which wasn’t always the case. At least they wished to be helpful. A missing girl generated that kind of response. But no one really knew anything, and ignorance took longer to process and assess than pertinent information.

Still, Nancy and Infante felt almost at peace with the day they had put in. Almost. Flight was tantamount to confession. Ronnie Fuller was hiding something, and she would tell them what it was when they found her. And they would find her. A teenage girl who worked in a bagel shop and lived with her parents could hide only so long. Ronnie didn’t even know how to drive- Nancy and Infante had learned that from her mother, a woman who wasn’t so much pale as gray and lumpy, like a doll left outside too long. Ronnie didn’t have a boyfriend, or any friends, period. That was how her mother put it, sitting at her kitchen table, head bowed in shame: “No boyfriend. No friends. Period.”

But what if time mattered? Even if their client was a corpse-which was Lenhardt’s private slogan for their department, “Your corpse is our client”-time was important. But if the girl was being kept alive, as Olivia Barnes had been, then time was an enemy and an ally, a tease and a cheat. Every minute that passed gave them hope. Every minute filled them with despair.

“And you know what would be the worst possible outcome?” Nancy said, speaking as if she had been airing her thoughts out loud all along.

Infante caught up with her, a ballroom dancer used to following a partner’s improvisations.

“If she was alive for a while and now isn’t,” he said. “I mean, if she’s going to be dead, it’s better if she’s been dead all along, since early Friday night. Otherwise, it’s lose-lose. People will be second-guessing us, and whatever we did will be the wrong thing in hindsight. Solving the case won’t matter.”

“It won’t matter as much.”

“I gotta say, I think she’s dead.”

“I don’t know what to think. It doesn’t make sense. Cutting the hair and changing the clothes suggests abduction for a purpose. But then there’s this T-shirt with blood on it.”

“Only not her blood.”

“It just doesn’t sound like what they would do. The girls, I mean. It’s nothing like what they did last time.”

“That’s right-you know them, don’t you?” Infante’s tone was supercasual, the kind of tone he might use in an interrogation. Nancy wondered what Lenhardt had confided in Infante last night, in the men’s room. She was told he wanted them to work the case because Jeffries was up, and Jeffries wasn’t much good. A year from his twenty-and-out, he was like a piece of furniture that had gone out of style and they just kept shifting him around the room, too sentimental to call bulk trash to haul him away. So it was credible that Lenhardt didn’t want him to work this case. Credible, plausible-but Lenhardt would be the first to remind Nancy that those words didn’t guarantee truth, just a reasonable facsimile. Credible stories were the kind they picked apart every day.

“I wouldn’t say I know them,” Nancy said, choosing her words carefully. She had never spoken to Ronnie Fuller before today, and Alice Manning was still nothing more than a face she had glimpsed at the courthouse long ago. It was their handiwork that had gotten tangled up in her life, the evidence of their venality, not the girls themselves. “I had a…minor connection to the Olivia Barnes case. So, some coincidence, huh, me working this case?”

She was giving Infante a chance to contradict her, to tell her if Lenhardt had moved them up in the rotation for any specific reason.

“I don’t know. You work in law enforcement long enough, you’re going to see certain people more than once, even if you change jurisdictions. Like Lenhardt and the Epstein case.”

“Yeah.” Nancy didn’t have a clue what Infante was referencing. She didn’t mind asking questions when she didn’t know something, but she had also figured out that much would be revealed from context, if a person was patient. The Epstein case. She filed it away, knowing the story would emerge eventually.

They were on the Beltway, completing the long, sweeping loop around the city, making their way back to headquarters. The vast, inefficient expanse that was the county still amazed Nancy. Driving, just driving, accounted for a third of her overtime every year. Some people said the county was shaped like a wrench, and Baltimore was the lug. Nancy thought it looked like a piece of snot hanging from the Pennsylvania line. “So much space, so little crime,” Lenhardt said, his voice almost wistful for the felony-dense precincts of the city. It had to be an easier place to hide. But then, Ronnie didn’t know the county either. She was a city girl, and the only place she had known for the last seven years was whatever juvenile facility had held her.

All Ronnie had was a five-minute head start on them, but so far it had proved to be enough. That’s how long they had needed to conclude that she wasn’t going to emerge from the kitchen, wasn’t hanging up her apron, or going to the bathroom, or combing her hair. O’lene, the girl who worked the ovens, just shrugged her skinny shoulders and said she hadn’t noticed anything. The manager, Clarice something, had been as unhelpful as she dared, her loathing for Nancy and Infante palpable. A middle-aged black woman living and working in Southwest Baltimore was not likely to be a fan of the police under any circumstances. But Clarice’s antipathy had been pronounced, personal. Nancy had the impression that the woman didn’t want anyone to talk to Ronnie until she had a chance to question her.

Yet it was Clarice who, unwittingly, told them what they needed to know: On Friday, the day Brittany Little had disappeared, Ronnie had left the store at 3:30 P.M. Clarice had told them this as a way of praising Ronnie’s constancy, her excellent work habits, and they had nodded, as if they agreed. But all it meant was that Ronnie was off on her own, a few hundred yards from Value City, only a few hours before Brittany was reported missing.

“ Brittany Little’s mother called the police about six-thirty,” Infante said. “That gives Ronnie Fuller three hours to walk across the parking lot, buy whatever she needed, then pick out her victim.”

“But see, that doesn’t make sense if the whole point is that the girl looks like the younger sister of the baby Ronnie killed seven years ago. If Cynthia Barnes is right, it’s a case of mistaken identity. But Ronnie knows what Cynthia and her husband look like. If she saw Brittany with her real mother, she wouldn’t make that mistake.”

“Maybe she thought the woman was a baby-sitter or something. I will say Maveen Little was pretty convincing, stupid as she is. Her story stayed constant, late as we talked to her last night. Hey, you ever date a black man?”

Now it was Nancy ’s turn to follow Infante’s twist of thought. “Just because her boyfriend is black, and her baby’s father is black, doesn’t mean she dates only black men.”

“I bet she does. It’s a type, you see it all the time, especially in South and Southwest Baltimore. What’s that about, anyway-white girls who date only black guys? I never got that.”

“I don’t know.”

“So did you ever date a black guy?”

“I’ve been with Andy since I was in high school. I barely dated anyone.”

“Yeah, but would you? Like…Denzel Washington. Would you go out with him? I mean, not him, because hell, I’d probably bend over for him, rich and good-looking as he is. But say there’s a guy in, I don’t know, Auto Theft, and he’s attractive and nice and treats women right. Would you go out with him?”

“I’m married, remember?”

“But if you weren’t. C’mon, play with me, Nancy. Would you date a black guy under those circumstances?”

“Yeah, sure.” Actually, she didn’t think she would, although she would never rule it out. Her taste happened to run to blond men, men like the Polish boys she had known all her life, a Daddy thing.

“I’d love to go out with a black girl.”

“I thought your thing was redheads.”

“I’m-what’s the word-inclusive.”

Nancy had to laugh at that. Infante’s candor about his weaknesses made them easy to forgive. He didn’t pretend to be anyone other than who he was.

She wished she could say as much about herself.

The sun was setting when they got back to the office. The longest day of the year had come and gone, but the days were still plenty long, and a case like this offered no natural stopping point. Sometimes, going home was a form of discipline, a way of admitting you were only human, needing sleep and food. But who would leave work, much less sleep, when a girl was missing? They had put out the Amber Alert this morning, and Lenhardt had told them the commissioner wanted to launch a search if they didn’t have any solid leads in twenty-four hours. The only question was where would they search, how could they establish a grid? In the area around the mall, the area around Ronnie Fuller’s home?

Or the site of the old crime, the place where Olivia Barnes had been killed.

Leakin Park, taunted a voice in Nancy ’s head, a voice she had been shouting down all day. You’re going to have to go back to Leakin Park. It was a cool, detached voice, one she had begun hearing more and more as she advanced in the department. She thought of the voice as an older, wiser self, visiting from the future. Sometimes she wished the voice would tell her everything it knew. Other times she just wanted it to go away, leave her alone.

Besides, the Chicken Man’s house surely was long gone. It had been decrepit seven years ago, and the trail project should have meant its demise. Or the Barnes family had made sure that the shack was bulldozed. That sad, broken-down place wasn’t the kind of memorial anyone wanted for their child.

Infante’s pager went off in the parking lot and he looked down. “Weird,” he said. “It’s coming from inside the building, from the switchboard.”

They walked into the lobby and the desk attendant looked up, not at all surprised by the synchronicity that brought the two detectives into view seconds after they had been paged.

“These ladies,” the attendant said through the perforations in the Plexiglas, “are here to see you.”

Infante and Nancy turned and realized that the two women sitting in the lobby were Helen Manning, who looked different in her street clothes, and a hulking, almost obese woman in a pink T-shirt and brightly printed stretch pants that were being forced to live up to their name.

“I’m Alice,” the fat woman said, “and I want to help you any way I can.”

20.

Mira Jenkins sat in the downtown office of the Beacon-Light on another ho-hum Saturday night, trying to figure out exactly when newspapers had decided they preferred nothing to happen. She had come in for her weekly night shift determined as always, happy to spin straw into gold if that’s what she needed to get a byline in the next day’s paper. But the day cop reporter had been lamentably efficient, scooping up the overnight array of misdemeanor murders and fatal auto accidents and transforming them into briefs. Mira was left with nothing but condition checks on those who hadn’t been considerate enough to die by 5 P.M.

Now, with 10 P.M. fast approaching, she wouldn’t be allowed to leave the office for anything short of World War Whatever-defined as a multiple murder in a bad neighborhood or a single homicide in a good one-because the night editor couldn’t authorize overtime or hold the pages without the managing editor’s go-ahead. Plus, she had to be in the office to watch the ten o’clock and the eleven o’clock news, because the one thing the television stations did better than the paper was jump on stories from the scanner.

Even then she wasn’t guaranteed a byline. Some weekends the editor might dismiss even multiples as briefs, depending on the demographics. But there had also been Saturday nights when Mira was sent out to horrible neighborhoods for rinky-dink two-alarms with no bodies, just because some flashy image in the video had caught the executive editor’s eye.

Her one crucial responsibility, or so she was informed when she started the Saturday shift, was the 8 P.M. dinner run. The night editor, who otherwise kept her on a short leash, would juggle anything to make sure she was free to do that chore.

“You can pick,” he had said, fanning the take-out menus in front of her. “Chinese, pizza, Japanese. You go, you pick.”

“Why do I have to get your dinner at all? Because I’m the girl?”

“Oh, settle down, Gloria Steinem,” he said. He was that out of it, he actually said Gloria Steinem. “Night cops gets dinner. Ask anyone. Ask rewrite. Ask the guy who did this job before you. This is a godforsaken neighborhood after 6 P.M. on Saturday. We have to brown-bag it or send someone out. Wear your beeper.”

The last admonition was unnecessary. Mira always wore her beeper. She had arrived at the paper with one, an accessory not commonly needed by a neighborhood reporter in the county bureau. It had been her expectation that the suburban assignment would last six, maybe nine months at the most. But she was still stuck in the county seventeen months later, watching newer and less worthy reporters get the call downtown. All because of one mistake, a mistake that could happen to anyone, a mistake that wasn’t entirely her fault.

Yet Mira was perhaps the one person at the paper who didn’t blame her situation entirely on That Story, as it was known in news-room shorthand. Mira blamed her name.

“It’s Mira with an i,” she sang into the phone almost every day. “M-i-r-a, Mira.” The confusion was entirely her own fault, for she had been born Myra with a y and decided upon entering college to revise herself by just one letter. Myra was an old lady’s name, whereas Mira had a certain glamour to it.

The unexpected consequence was that she went through life correcting people upon first meeting. “No, it’s Mira, long i. Not Meer-a. Not like the actress.” She should have gone whole hog, changed the pronunciation along with the spelling, but that had seemed like a bigger mistruth. That was Mira’s word for the white lies of which she availed herself no more often than anyone else. Mistruths.

But if she’d had it to do over, she would never have contradicted the top editor when he referred to her as Meera. “It’s Mira,” she had said automatically, and then realized her mistake. Nostrildamus, as the editor of the paper was known behind his back, had been disturbed to be in error even on something as innocuous as the pronunciation of an unusual name. Mira got the job, but she was left with the distinct feeling that if Nostrildamus-then known to her only as Willard B. Norton-wanted her to be Meera, she should have agreed to be Meera.

She had tried to make up for that early blunder by cracking the code of this particular workplace culture, as she had done in high school, college, her internships, and her previous job. By every measure, she had much of what was required for success here-she was young, hardworking, and pretty in the right way. The right way being interpreted, as everything about Nostrildamus was interpreted, by inference and example. Judging by the women he hired, he preferred a skinny kind of prettiness, not too flamboyant and not overtly sexual. He also liked the females to solicit his opinion on all matters, large and small, to treat him like a father figure. The young women agreed it was creepy, but innocuous, the kind of gray area flirtation that had long been part of their pretty young lives.

After that disastrous first meeting, Mira had styled herself after the paper’s most successful reporters. She had made appointments to “drop by,” seeking his story ideas, asking for his career advice. If he had called her Meera again, she would have let it stand, but instead it seemed his gaffe was what he remembered. “Why, it’s Mira with an i,” he said when she entered his office. He said it in the hallway, if she happened to pass him by, and on his infrequent visits to the bureau. She began to wonder if he knew anything else about her.

When she asked him where she might go next, when she spoke of being ready for new challenges and bigger beats, he became vague and distant, as if she were a telemarketer he wanted to brush off politely: “It’s my observation that people here don’t spend enough time on their beats, don’t hunker down and really learn the ins and outs of beat reporting. I predict”-he was big on predicting, which explained half his nickname; he would even hold his index finger aloft, a regular Mr. Wizard-“I predict you will have plenty of time to do other things.”

“And until then?”

“Let’s keep giving those neighborhoods the careful attention they deserve. Go to community meetings. Take local activists to lunch. Build up your Rolodex, develop sources. Neighborhoods are the building blocks of society, the DNA of Baltimore.”

“Yes, but neighborhoods aren’t as defined in the county as they are in the city,” she ventured, making sure it sounded more like a question than a challenge. Speaking with Nostrildamus was a variation on Jeopardy! Every answer had to be in the form of a question. He simply nodded, assuming agreement in her voice. Sometimes she wasn’t sure that Nostrildamus heard the actual words that came out of her mouth, or anyone’s mouth. His responses didn’t quite match up. Something seemed to go dark inside him when another person spoke, as if he left his body through astral projection and returned only when it was his turn to take the helm of the conversation.

“Yes, indeedie,” he said, being the kind of man who said “indeedie” and “awesome be dawesome,” and, most mysteriously, “Thanks for the college knowledge.” “Neighborhoods are the DNA of our city, and you have to see yourself as one of the scientists trying to crack the genome.”

She nodded earnestly, staring up into the black, bottomless holes of his nose, which accounted for the other half of his nickname. He had remarkably large nostrils, and because of the way he held his head while speaking, his reporters were forced to gaze into them.

“Watch out for him,” an older reporter had told Mira in her early weeks. “He’ll send you to the cornfields.”

“What?”

“That’s right, you’re too young to remember The Twilight Zone. There’s a little kid with psychic powers who holds a whole town in thrall because he punishes anyone who doesn’t do exactly what he likes. What he likes is the same food day in, day out, with a birthday party at the end of every day. And no contradictions. If he even catches you thinking contrary thoughts, he’ll send you to the cornfields, which means you’re as good as dead.”

Mira had shrugged, bored as usual by the baby boomer habit of referring to things from their youth. The Twilight Zone. Jesus. Why not The Honeymooners, why not Fibber McGee? The way she saw it, anyone who remembered black-and-white television should have the good sense to read a few magazines, keep up with what was going on now.

Nostrildamus couldn’t send her to the cornfields because she was already there. But he could keep her there for her mistakes. The irony was, That Story was his fault. But only he and Mira knew this. Nostrildamus was the one who had passed the handwritten letter along to her, with his distinctive red printing: Just a suggestion, but this looks very interesting.

Just a suggestion was widely understood as Do it now, so she had knocked herself out. She had driven to the Woodlawn neighborhood and interviewed an elderly black man about his role in desegregating a nearby amusement park, Gwynn Oak. Almost forty years after the fact, the man wanted to buy the abandoned property, which remained behind fences, a wild and implausible place in a once-suburban neighborhood that was going rapidly to seed. He described a vision of a public park, with statues to civil rights leaders. All he needed, he said, was start-up money. He was even willing to mortgage his own modest home to get the ball rolling. That had been his phrase-to get the ball rolling.

The story had run off the front on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, and the only ball that rolled had been the one that flattened Mira’s career. The calls had started at 7 A.M., overwhelming the morning cop reporter, the only person in the office early on a holiday morning. Mira’s subject was a penny-ante con artist, hopelessly delusional. On the day the civil rights protesters had marched on Gwynn Oak, he had been serving time for larceny. His dream may have been true, but little else in the story was. He didn’t even own the house he was willing to mortgage.

Who would lie about such a thing? What was the point? “If your mother says she loves you, check it out,” one of the older reporters told her, in seeming sympathy, but Mira suspected he was rejoicing at her blunder. Although neither she nor her story was cited in the subsequent memos and workshops, everyone knew why they were being reminded to run criminal record checks and pull the clips. If Mira had compared her source’s stories to the original coverage, she would have seen he was wrong on several key details.

The Saturday night cop shift had been her self-selected penance. She had cut a deal with Nostrildamus and the secretary who kept the pay sheets, agreeing to work six days a week for straight-up comp time instead of overtime. Comp time the bosses knew she would never take, because she didn’t even use up her two weeks of vacation time. That was another part of the culture here: no one got ahead by taking time off. If the union knew about her arrangement, they would shit, but the union took twenty-two dollars a week out of her paycheck and what did it do for her? Oh, they had been ready to defend her when she screwed up, but that was more for them than for her. The union wasn’t going to get her downtown full time. If Maryland law had allowed it, she would have quit or refused to pay the dues. Then Nostrildamus would know where her true allegiance lay.

So she was downtown one night a week. Just her luck, Saturday nights went cold when she arrived. The good stories, the page-one stories, now seemed to happen every other night of the week. There was nothing to do but read the wires and other newspapers, which didn’t actually interest Mira much. Mira liked the idea of newspapers, enjoyed telling people she was a reporter, but the daily product meant little to her. Her passion was hitting milestones, accumulating tangible proof of her advancement.

Now she was stuck. In this city, in the suburbs, on permanent Saturdays, in limbo. She was even between boyfriends, unusual for her. She no longer remembered why she had chosen journalism, but she remembered her determination to succeed in it. She was not going to slink off to PR. Thank God she hadn’t jumped ship in the dot-com boom, which had lured so many of her friends away, then stranded them. She was not a failure. She got lots of “good jobs” from Nostrildamus and the occasional fifty-dollar American Express gift cheque, largely in recognition of all that unpaid overtime. She was being reborn. It was just taking so damn long.

For some reason, this made her think of the story from one of the western states, where a mother had hired a rebirthing coach to help a troubled child, and they had ended up smothering the girl in her own vomit while simulating passage through the birth canal. Now that would be a good story. She could do something with that. What could she do in a city where it was just boom-boom-boom, one lowlife taking out another lowlife, and not even at the hours that fit her schedule?

The night editor’s voice interrupted her reverie: “Call for you, Jenkins.”

“Put it on 6129.”

“I know the extension,” the night editor said. He was quick to remind Mira of everything he knew-and everything she didn’t know. A few months ago, on a freezing winter night, he had ordered her to go stare at a street sign on a forlorn corner five blocks north because she had misspelled it in a brief. She had gone downstairs, hidden in the ladies’ room off the lobby, and come back a suitable interval later. “ Centre Street,” she had said, “C-E-N-T-R-E,” pretending humility, shivering a little for effect. She had checked it on the map she kept in her purse. “I won’t get it wrong again.”

“Newsroom,” she said on a sigh. “Mira Jenkins.”

“You’re a reporter?”

The very challenge in the voice, the unearned hostility, signaled trouble. The night editor must have forwarded one of the regular nuts just to play with her.

“Yes, I’m a reporter. I cover police on Saturdays, but during the week I’m out in Baltimore County.”

That should scare her caller off. Nuts always wanted to talk to the most important people, Nostrildamus or one of the metro columnists.

“How old are you?”

“I’m not sure how that’s relevant. Is there something I can help you with tonight?”

“Oh, it’s rel-e-vant.”

The husky female voice was perplexing. The syntax was ghetto, but the pronunciation was sharp, exaggerated. It reminded Mira of the way people speak after drinking, when they’re trying to convince others they aren’t drunk.

“How may I help you?” Mira repeated. She must not lose her temper with any caller, no matter how rude. One unhelpful word to the wrong person, a person who knew Nostrildamus, and she was beyond rehabilitation.

“You can help by knowing a little history. You know history?”

“I like to think I do.”

“You know local history?”

The rhythms were definitely ghetto to Mira’s ear, but she had to be careful. There were some politically connected types who spoke that way.

“Is there something I can do for you tonight?”

“A baby disappeared.”

“Yes, we’ve been following that story.” Another chore done by the day cop reporter, who had thoroughly covered the absence of leads and the Baltimore County cops’ refusal to say whether they thought this was a stranger kidnap, a domestic homicide, or something in between. Nostrildamus didn’t like the story, Mira had heard from the night editor when she came in today. “I predict,” the executive editor had said at the Friday four o’clock news meeting, “that this will prove to be a sad but small story. The media has gone overboard in its coverage of such stories, which have no true global importance. I predict”-finger held aloft-“that it is time for the pendulum to swing the other way.” No one in the meeting had the heart to suggest that Nostrildamus might see the future differently if the child had been white and middle-class, instead of a biracial girl from a marginal city neighborhood. “If you want page-one treatment from the Beacon-Light,” the night editor had told Mira, “you need to disappear from a better part of town. Preferably his.”

The night editor was just trying to make her feel better for being elbowed out of a story that had actually happened in one of her duller-than-dirt neighborhoods. Mira’s only contribution so far had been to ferry a photo downtown, which had earned her a ’trib line, even though the desk forgot to use the photo.

“You have been following,” the voice agreed. “Now you need to lead.”

“I’m not sure I-”

“You must remind people that this has happened before, that such coincidences are to be explored, not ignored.”

“I’m sorry,” Mira said, checking out the Caller ID log on the phone. But because the call had been forwarded by the night editor, it showed his extension, not the originating number. “But I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Now, see.” The voice was triumphant. “That’s why I asked your age, where you were from. Nobody who lived here seven years ago could forget what happened that summer.”

Seven years ago. Mira was starting her senior year at Penn, dating a boy named Bart, short for Bartholomew. He had money and ambition-the first sometimes precluded the second, she had later learned. She knew she didn’t love him, not really, and he didn’t love her, but they would use the word from time to time, to be polite. The memories came back to her, like a movie montage. The golden autumns, the tender springs, the scullers on the Schuylkill.

“Well, I didn’t live here then, and I don’t know.”

“A girl named Olivia went missing,” the voice hissed. “Judge Poole’s granddaughter. Two white girls killed her but they got juvenile time because they were white. You want to think what would happen to two black girls who killed a white judge’s granddaughter? You think the legislature would have said, ‘Oh, no, we can’t be lowering the limit, you can’t send eleven-year-olds to adult prison.’ ”

“What does this have to do with the child who’s missing now?” The very suggestion of racism put Mira off. She didn’t deny its existence in the world, but talking about it every day was like discussing anything else you couldn’t control-the weather, time, death, taxes. People needed to move on.

“They sent those white girls away seven years ago. Now they’re home and another baby’s gone. And I can guarantee you, the police are looking at those girls, trying to find out if they had anything to do with it. You call the police. You ask them if they’re talking to those girls and they’ll have to say yes if they’re not lying to you. You tell people that another child is going to die because they wouldn’t do it right the last time.”

“What-”

The line was dead.

Mira stared at the phone for a good long time.

“Hey, Bolt,” she called to the night editor, who probably wouldn’t look up if his first name were uttered. “You notice the number on that call you forwarded?”

“Didn’t know the number, didn’t know the voice,” he said promptly. “We got a new weirdo joining the ranks?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, whoever it was asked for you by name. You got a friend out there?”

No, but she had a ’trib line on the story, she remembered, and had tried to make a few follow-up phone calls this evening.

She closed her AOL e-mail account, on which she had been sending witty, vicious letters to various college friends, and called up the paper’s in-house library. She specified a date range, giving herself a three-year period-people were imperfect when it came to time-and dropped in the terms Olivia and missing. Too many files came back, including several reviews of Twelfth Night. She looked at the notes she had doodled as the woman spoke. She tried Olivia and Poole.

Seventeen matches in all, and not one more recent than the summer of the crime, seven years earlier. Mira read with careful, absorbed attention, breaking away only to watch the evening newscasts. All four programs carried stories about the missing girl, but not one mentioned the old case or suggested a connection. There seemed to be no developments at all.

When the end of Mira’s shift arrived, the night editor had to remind her three times that she was free to go. She printed out the library stories she had been reading and tucked them away in a manila folder, taking them home.

21.

Nancy had been experimenting with several postures and stances in interrogations, not to mention various intonations and degrees of eye contact. Lately she had tried standing, her back against the door, her arms folded across her chest. She thought this pose projected the air of a stern teacher or parent. “That’s the problem,” Lenhardt had told her. “You do look like a teacher, and these aren’t the kind of people who have fond memories of school. If these guys had listened to their teachers, they might have turned out a little differently.”

He was right. The men-and so far Nancy had interviewed mostly young men, with an occasional mom and girlfriend thrown into the mix-were sullen or resentful, seldom cooperative. But Nancy couldn’t intimidate the way Infante did, especially toward the end of the day, when his five o’clock shadow gave him that blue-black werewolf look. Nor did she have Lenhardt’s air of mournful disappointment, which was surprisingly effective with a certain kind of mutt. Plus, if she stood, it gave her a height advantage.

One thing she was sure of: She wasn’t going to go all girly. A cop couldn’t flirt confessions out of people, and she would look weak if she tried.

None of these concerns, however, applied to Alice Manning, who had arrived here with the nervous shake of someone who actually respected authority. Nancy took a seat across from her in the interview room, hands folded on the table in front of her. Alice unconsciously mirrored her, the way a chimpanzee in a zoo imitated onlookers. Only she looked like someone waiting for a meal at a city mission. Nancy glanced at the girl’s pale forearms, searching for fresh nicks or cuts, but saw nothing. The rest of her was too covered up to scout.

“I want to help. I really, really want to help,” Alice kept repeating.

“Well, the way you can help is by telling us what you know.”

“I’m not sure I know anything.”

“So why are you here?”

“Because my mom said you wanted to talk to me.”

“Do you know why we came to your house looking for you? Do you know why we think you may have information to share with us?”

“Because of my…past.”

The choice of word sounded like something Alice had been taught to say. Nancy could imagine Helen Manning schooling her daughter in just this fashion, giving her this grand yet inadequate word, as if Alice were a young Bette Davis, back in her glory days, when her big wounded eyes always seemed to hold some secret.

“Sort of.” It was important not to lead the girl, not to give her too much information. “A little girl disappeared Friday night. We’re looking at a lot of leads.”

“I’m a lead?” Alice tested the word, at once attracted and repelled.

“Well, that’s what we’re here to find out.”

“Is lead another word for suspect?”

Nancy couldn’t swear to it, but she thought she caught a wisp of something sly in Alice ’s face just then, a hard light in those wide blue eyes. Again, very Bette Davis. Like the song, the stupid song that had been on the radio when Nancy was in middle school. She’ll tease you, the song had promised. It was the only line Nancy could remember. She will something and something and tease you.

“Sometimes leads are suspects. And sometimes they’re just leads. Right now, you’re just a lead.”

Would Alice think to ask for a lawyer? It was funny how much and how little neophytes knew about the criminal process. Repeat offenders, of course, had the drill down cold. But first-timers didn’t think they could ask for a lawyer until they had been charged and read their Miranda rights. They didn’t realize they could just get up and walk out, say, “I’m not talking to you until you’re ready to charge me.” Or that they could lawyer up anytime.

Then again, Alice wasn’t a first-timer. And she had been cagey at eleven, Nancy recalled, almost preternaturally consistent, according to the detectives who caught the case. They had taken the baby because they thought she wasn’t safe. They were scared to return her after her parents made such a big deal of her disappearance. And then the baby got sick. But Alice didn’t know why Ronnie killed her. She wasn’t even there at the time.

“Why don’t you tell me,” Nancy began, her voice as bland as possible, “where you were Friday afternoon and evening.”

“I was walking.”

“Walking?”

“I’ve been walking a lot. It’s a good way to lose weight.”

Nancy willed herself not to let her eyes drift down to the indistinct bulk beneath Alice ’s bright pink T-shirt. The girl had to weigh almost two hundred pounds. God help her if she had weighed more when she came home.

“Walking? For how long?”

“Well, I don’t walk every minute I’m out.” Alice must have seen where the question was going. “I walk for a while, then take a break inside someplace air-conditioned, someplace they’ll let you sit or browse.”

“Like a fast-food restaurant.”

“Yeah, although there you have to buy something. At least a drink. Which is a waste of money, they put so much ice in.”

“Or a mall?” Keeping it generic was deliberate. No need to mention Westview yet.

“Sure.”

“So where did you walk on Friday, where did you stop?”

“I started out Route 40 and I filled out an application at an Arby’s-I’m looking for a job. I don’t want to work in fast food, but my mom says I can’t afford to be picky.”

“It’s not so bad. I did it for a little while.”

“Yeah?” She seemed genuinely interested.

“I was a counter girl at Long John Silver’s the summer I was sixteen, until I got a waitressing job at a Chili’s. I was saving up for a car.”

Why had she told the girl this stray bit of personal information? It was one thing Nancy never did. But there was something about Alice that made Nancy want to curry favor-something closed off, an unspoken accusation in her face, like a stoic child who had taken an unearned punishment without flinching or complaining.

“I like Chili’s,” Alice offered, “but my mom doesn’t. Were you popular?”

“At the restaurant?”

“In high school.”

“I don’t know. I never thought about it.” She was glad Lenhardt wasn’t watching this. It was bad enough that Infante was tracking the conversation through the one-way glass. She was losing control, letting Alice direct the flow of conversation. Maybe it would loosen the girl up, lead to something she could use.

“So you must have been. Only a popular person wouldn’t think about it.”

“It was just high school.”

“I didn’t get to go to high school. Not a real one. Although I got my diploma at Middlebrook.”

Suddenly Nancy knew what Alice wanted from her: pity. The girl actually expected sympathy, for missing high school and all the other normal rituals of adolescence.

“Well, Olivia Barnes didn’t get to go to high school either.”

Alice, chastised, bent her head so Nancy could not see her eyes when she whispered: “I know.”

“There’s another little girl missing, Alice.”

“I know.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw it on the news. My mom told me.”

“Which is it? You saw it on the news or your mom told you?”

“My mom told me and then I saw it on the news for myself, this morning.”

“She disappeared from Westview Mall. Is that one of the places you go, when you’re walking? It’s on Route 40.”

Her head was still down, her voice faint. “Yes.”

“Do you know anything? Anything at all about this missing little girl?”

“I know,” Alice said, “something I’m not supposed to know. But I know it because, because…I broke a rule.”

“A rule?”

“Well, more like an admonition.” Alice raised her head, as if surprised she knew this word and could use it.

“An admonition?”

“I think that’s right. I mean, it’s not a law, or a rule, it’s just something I was told I shouldn’t do. My mom and my lawyer, they said there were certain things I shouldn’t do. And I sorta did them.”

“What did you do, Alice?”

“I didn’t walk by the Barnes house,” she said. Interesting. Asked what she had done, the girl began by citing what she had not done. If she hadn’t walked by the Barnes house, would she even know there was a new little Barnes?

“There’s no reason for you to. Is there?”

“It’s in my neighborhood and it’s a pretty street. I used to walk up and down it all the time. But I don’t go there now.”

“Have you seen the Barnes family at all?”

“No.”

Her denial felt like the most honest thing she had said so far. Which meant that she would have no reason to grab a girl who looked like Rosalind Barnes. Nancy allowed herself a moment of despair. What if this were all a coincidence? What if Cynthia Barnes’s paranoia had set them off in the wrong direction? She tried to reassure herself that she and Infante had kept all their options open. A young detective from Family Crimes was trying to stay on top of the Social Services end of it, checking out the family more thoroughly. And this, sadly enough, was the only lead Nancy and Infante had developed in twenty-four hours. If Nancy hadn’t been interviewing Alice, she’d just be taking phone calls from helpful, helpless cranks, interviewing dimwitted mall employees, watching security tapes that showed nothing.

“So that’s what you didn’t do. What did you do? What”-she chose, quite deliberately, to echo Alice ’s word back to her-“admonition did you ignore?”

She whispered: “I saw Ronnie.”

“Ronnie Fuller?”

Alice nodded, her face stricken, as if she had confessed to something horrible.

“You saw Ronnie…” She left a space for Alice to finish the thought, but the girl didn’t jump in. “You saw Ronnie do what?”

Alice looked deflated, as if she had expected a more horrified reaction. “I just…saw her. I walked over to where she works and I watched her. She didn’t see me. But I’m not supposed to see her. Sharon said.”

Sharon who? Nancy let it pass. “So you saw her. When was this?”

A flash of impatience: “Yesterday. That’s what we’re talking about, right? Yesterday.”

“You were at the Bagel Barn yesterday?”

“I didn’t go in. I didn’t even get close. I just sat on the curb for a while. I could see Ronnie, but she didn’t see me.”

Alice seemed to have no sense of what she was doing. Yes, she was placing Ronnie at Westview Mall, a few hours before Brittany Little disappeared. But she was placing herself there, too.

“Did you see her do anything…unusual?”

“No. But I saw Ronnie. I thought you’d want to know she worked there. Did you?”

“Actually,” Nancy said, “we did.”

“Oh.” Alice looked confused. “I thought that’s why you came to see me. Because you knew I had seen Ronnie. I thought that’s why I was in trouble. I couldn’t imagine what else I might have done.”

“You can’t?”

The girl shook her head.

“ Alice -did you go into the mall yesterday?”

“No. I left because I didn’t want Ronnie to see me.”

“Why did you want to see Ronnie?”

“I didn’t want to see her. I just did.”

“By accident?”

“Sort of.”

“What do you mean, ‘sort of.’ It was an accident, or it wasn’t.”

“I knew from my mom that Ronnie had a job at the bagel place. But I didn’t know her hours, or what days she worked. So it’s not like I could have planned it.”

“But you went there hoping you might see her?”

Her eyes slid away from Nancy ’s. “Yes,” she said in a voice so soft that Nancy needed Alice ’s nodding head to confirm what she thought she had heard.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” And then, almost to herself, as if castigating herself. “I thought you didn’t know about the bagel shop, that I could help you. I want to help. I’m trying to help.”

“You can help us,” Nancy said, “by telling the truth.”

Fierce, automatic: “I always tell the truth.”

“Then tell me this. Do you know anything about Brittany Little, the girl who disappeared? Anything at all, Alice?”

“I don’t know Brittany Little. I mean, except from the news. I saw her picture on the news.”

“Can I ask you something, Alice?”

Alice gave her an odd look, as if it were late in the game for Nancy to be seeking permission to ask questions. Still, she nodded.

“I mean, it’s only because it might give me-give us-an insight. When you took Olivia Barnes, what were you thinking?”

The wounded blue eyes cut right through her, saw the deception in Nancy ’s question. “How would that give you an insight? I mean, unless Ronnie or I did what happened. And I didn’t.”

“Still-” Nancy had to know. Even if it proved to have nothing to do with the matter at hand, she had to have the answer to the question that had haunted her for so many years. “What were you thinking?”

“We thought she had been abandoned. We thought we could take care of her until her parents came back.”

“And why did you kill her?”

“I didn’t,” Alice said with a weariness at once disappointed and resigned. “Ronnie did. I wasn’t even there when it happened.”

“I know that’s what you said back then. But you can tell the truth now. It’s over. There’s no risk now in telling me what happened.”

“I am telling the truth. I always told the truth. It’s not my fault that no one believed me. Ronnie’s a bad girl. You can’t know what she’ll do. It’s almost like there’s another girl who lives inside Ronnie and comes out sometimes. That’s why people want to believe Ronnie when she says she didn’t do things, because she doesn’t remember doing them, so she seems really honest. But she’s bad, really bad.”

“Are you saying she has, like, another personality?”

“Sort of?” Alice ’s voice was tentative. “I saw this show once, and there was a girl like that. Only with Ronnie, it’s not so…obvious, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Her voice doesn’t change, and she doesn’t tell you to call her by a different name. But it’s like there’s good Ronnie and bad Ronnie, and bad Ronnie will do anything, and then good Ronnie can’t believe she did it, so she’s believable when she says she doesn’t remember. I don’t know why she killed Olivia. If I had been there, maybe I could have stopped her. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t even there.”

Alice ’s voice rose, petulant after all these years. Yes, she took the baby, yes, she knew where the baby was, yes, she participated in the conspiracy that kept the baby hidden for four days. But she hadn’t killed her, and she still didn’t understand why the punishments meted out refused to recognize her lesser guilt.

Nancy wasn’t sure she did, either. Her odd connection to the Barnes case had not granted her special privileges, despite what everyone believed, but over the years she had indulged her curiosity about the aftermath. Alice had always been adamant about not being with Ronnie when Olivia was killed, and even had a partial alibi-she was home with her mother, reading, if you could call that an alibi. Whose mother wouldn’t back up that story, under the circumstances? But the alibi was meaningless because heat and other factors had made it difficult to pinpoint the time of death with any accuracy. The medical examiner had provided a twelve-hour window, adding, as only an M.E. could add: “At least nothing chewed on her after she died.” That was an M.E.’s idea of a benediction, not getting chewed postmortem.

“ Alice -” There was so much Nancy wanted to ask her, but the sad fact was, it had little to do with Brittany Little and everything to do with Olivia Barnes. Nancy was face-to-face with a girl who had changed her life as surely as anyone. Except, perhaps, Ronnie Fuller. If it were not for the two of them, Nancy wouldn’t even be here, in the county. If it weren’t for Nancy ’s freak moment of glory in the Olivia Barnes case, there would have been less to live up to and, consequently, less to live down. She would probably still be in the city, a detective in CID, maybe even a sergeant. She would be who she was supposed to be when she grew up, a third-generation police officer in the Baltimore PD. “County police,” her uncle Stan had asked when she decided to come out here. “Do they even have crime in the county?”

You bet they do, she answered her uncle now. The only difference was the ten-to-one ratio. But the detectives worked roughly the same caseloads. And Nancy would have taken fifty never-going-to-be-solved drug shootings over a maybe homicide like this one.

Alice was still holding her plump arms in a prayerful pose. She had a milk-white pallor, almost creepy in its uniformity. Not a nick, not a cut, not even a bruise. It looked as if she never used her hands at all, for anything.

“C’mon, Alice, you say you want to help us. There’s one small thing-it would only take a minute-”

There was a light knock on the door. When Nancy opened it, Infante was there, motioning for her to come out. She did, closing the door on Alice, who looked stricken to be left alone.

Helen Manning was standing in the corridor with a fleshy, dark-haired woman with a strange spotted rash on the left side of her face.

“I’m Sharon Kerpelman,” she said. “I’m Alice ’s lawyer. Charge her or release her. At any rate, she’s not talking to you anymore tonight.”

“Look,” Infante said, “I saw your card. You’re city PD, you got no jurisdiction here. She’s not a juvenile anymore and this isn’t a city case.”

“I already told you, I’m here on behalf of Rosario Bustamante, who has agreed to represent Alice. Ms. Bustamante is…indisposed and asked that I come here to make arrangements for Alice ’s release.”

“I don’t think we can do that.”

“Oh, fuck me. Alice called and left a message on my machine two hours ago, asking me to accompany her here or find someone who could. I got that message twenty minutes ago. But you know, and I know, she can get up and walk out of here on her own steam. I’m certainly not going to let you talk to her at this late hour, when she’s tired and suggestible and would say anything to make you happy.”

“We’ve got her at the scene,” Nancy said.

“Really? That’s funny because I had dinner with Alice last night, and I don’t think she had time to take a child, stash her somewhere, and walk home.” Sharon walked over to the door and yanked it open. “Were you at Westview on Friday, Alice? Don’t be afraid to say what really happened, sweetheart.”

Alice ’s voice came back, tentative and sweet: “Well, maybe it was another day. I mean, I did go there once, and see Ronnie. But it was a week or two ago.”

Sharon Kerpelman looked triumphant. “See? She hears you’re looking for her, and she knows it’s all because of what happened in the past, and she can’t stop trying to make it right.” Maybe it was Sharon, not Helen, who had taught Alice to think of her crime as a past. “And she knows Ronnie’s working at the Bagel Barn, and thinks you should know it, too.”

“But why lie? Why say it was yesterday if it wasn’t yesterday?”

“There’s a lot-” Helen began, but Sharon shushed her with a look and an upraised hand. Then, motioning to Nancy and Infante, she led them down the hall, out of Alice ’s earshot.

“It’s hard, being Alice.” Sharon was trying to be reasonable in tone, conciliatory and conspiratorial, but she wasn’t good at it, and her voice grated on Nancy ’s nerves. “She got caught up in something that was bigger than she was, and she keeps trying to undo it. Seven years ago, she was too scared of Ronnie Fuller to keep her from doing what she did. Now police come around and she sees a chance for, I don’t know, a kind of redemption. She figures if she says what you want to hear, maybe she can balance the scales at last. But Alice didn’t have anything to do with this. If Ronnie Fuller did”-she shrugged-“that’s her lawyer’s problem, however.”

“Does she have a lawyer?”

“Figure of speech. I wouldn’t know.”

Without asking permission, Sharon Kerpelman walked into the interview room and came back out with Alice, her arm slung around the girl’s shoulder. “We’re going to go now. If you want to talk to her again, call me.”

“I thought,” Infante said, “Rosario Bustamante was her lawyer.”

“Right. That’s what I mean. Call her.”

Infante looked at Nancy, who shook her head sadly. They could fight this bitchy PD, insist that Bustamante herself come down before releasing Alice. But they had lost the moment. Alice wasn’t going to talk to them again, not tonight, not with any flow. How odd, to be shrewd enough to call a lawyer, but naive enough to begin speaking without one. Infante turned to Kerpelman and gave a brusque nod, as if it were his decision.

The trio left without another word. But Alice, to Nancy ’s amazement, turned and flapped her hand at her in a vague, shy wave.

22.

Gloria Potrcurzski had cried the first time she saw her daughter in uniform. Nancy assumed it was because her uncle, her mother’s brother, had been injured on patrol in his early years. Injured was almost an overstatement-a bullet had grazed his neck, just whistled right by him, requiring nothing more than an emergency room visit. But the incident had brought the family real pain for a few hours while a local radio station broadcast breathless bulletins about a “felled” officer in the 900 block of Hollins. Everyone in Stan Kolchak’s family knew his beat and knew his hours, so they had no doubt who the unnamed patrolman was. Yet the story’s happy ending just seemed to make the pain more pronounced in Gloria’s memory. So when she sobbed at the sight of her twenty-one-year-old daughter in uniform, Nancy had assumed the old fear was washing over her.

“Oh, honey,” her mother had said at last, “you look awful in that.”

She did, but Nancy had seen that coming. Since entering the academy, she had started noticing that even actresses on the various cop shows looked stocky and awkward in police uniforms. And they had the advantages of wasp waists, tiny butts, and professional wardrobe people. On Nancy, of average height with ample curves, the outfit was spectacularly unflattering-especially the winter one, when she had to wear her sweater tucked in.

But it was the mannish quality that made Gloria Kolchak Potrcurzski cry. Gloria had been the only girl in a family of six, and the world she created for her one daughter had been reactionary in its femininity-pink-and-white room, canopy bed, shelves of dolls, unlimited funds for clothes and hair care. And she was on the verge of success when twenty-year-old Nancy decided she was sick of fighting her own destiny. She changed her major to criminal justice and, nearly two years later, stood before her mother as a freshly minted cadet.

“I never thought my daughter would grow up to be a cop,” said the woman who was a daughter to one cop and a sister to two others.

“Don’t worry, Mom,” Nancy had said. “I’ll make detective quick enough, and then I’ll wear skirts every day.”

She was the kind of daughter who kept such promises. So seven years later, as Saturday eased into Sunday and the fourth of July gave way to the fifth, Nancy was wearing a tailored white blouse, a knee-length khaki skirt, hose, and Easy Spirit pumps. The shoes were more comfortable than regular pumps, but she wouldn’t want to play basketball in them, as women had in the old television ads.

Nor did she want to walk along an overgrown path and splash across a polluted stream in a darkness brightened only by the beam of a small flashlight, but that was what she had decided to do.

It was a hot, yeasty night, the kind that made old-timers downtown sniff the breeze and wonder if McCormick Spice Co. had suddenly rematerialized in the harbor. But the smell was all over the metro area, and it was more grain than spice. For Nancy, the hot, scent-laden wind stirred up memories of her Grandmother Potrcurzski’s kitchen-homemade rolls rising in a covered bowl, pierogi shells awaiting their fillings, a sweet undercurrent of cabbage. Cabbage could smell sweet if a cook treated it gently. Nancy drove into the past with her windows down, indifferent to the heat, wondering if she could find the right spot after all these years.

Olivia Barnes had been missing for four days going on five before the cadets were sent to this asphalt parking lot on the southwestern corner of Leakin Park. A homeless man had been found pushing Olivia’s carriage, using it instead of the usual shopping cart for the odd collection of things he considered valuable. Inevitably, the deranged man was treated as a suspect, but he was adamant in his insistence that he had found the carriage in the creek bed, a narrow stream shrunken by that summer’s drought. So a yellow school bus brought the academy students to the southwestern edge of the park. Nancy was among those cadets.

Of course, few classes went through the academy without searching Leakin Park at least once, as a training tool, and such searches usually began with the joking admonition not to grab just any old body, or they’d be there all day. But no one had cracked any jokes on the morning they gathered to look for Olivia Barnes. The only sounds in Leakin Park that day were the slow, measured footsteps of the cadets walking deeper and deeper into the park, trying to keep an even ten feet between them.

Outdoor searches are doomed to imperfection. Nancy knew that even before she went into the academy. People were always stunned when a body turned up in an area the police had already combed, but these second-guessers had never tried to search a forest step-by-step. On a July day, the deep shade of Leakin Park played tricks on the eyes, almost like a jigsaw puzzle, until everything was green, dark green, and gray. It was all too easy to imagine a child’s body hidden in a patch of vines that happened to fall in the space between the cadets’ dragging feet.

Nancy was partnered with a classmate, Cyrus Hickory, a cocky twenty-three-year-old who couldn’t get over the fact that he had a college degree. Cyrus was a study in contrasts, an African-American man with a shaved head and an accent that Nancy would describe as 100 percent redneck because her ear wasn’t trained to catch the watered-down imitation of Tidewater that Cyrus was trying out that summer: “When ah was getting my duh-gree at Commonwealth…” Nancy reminded him, after every third reference or so to his days at Virginia Commonwealth, that most of the cadets had college degrees now. But Cyrus countered: “I majored in criminology, with a minor in sociology. I chose this career for myself back when I was in sixth grade.”

Nancy had assumed he was insulting her, in a roundabout way. With two uncles and a fiancé in the department, she had a triple taint of nepotism. It turned out that Cyrus, from Virginia, didn’t know any of this, not on that faraway July day. As a result, he was one of the few people who dared to patronize her, which was oddly refreshing. At least she didn’t have to worry if he was playing up to her, the way some others seemed to do.

When they broke for lunch, eating sandwiches and drinking bottled water provided by a group of volunteers with ties to the missing child’s family, she told Cyrus that she thought the grid was off-kilter, sending them in the wrong direction.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he scoffed. “The carriage was found in the creek bed. So you gotta figure the kidnapper realized he couldn’t push it up the hill, and he dumped it there, then continued up and over the ridge.”

“I think he might have been walking along the stream, not trying to cross it, when he decided to get rid of the carriage. What if he was walking in the stream?”

“Why would someone do that?”

“Leaves less of a trail, right? No footprints in the dust, no smashed-down undergrowth. It’s the kind of stuff they teach you about Indians when you’re in the fifth grade.”

This information was, in fact, part of the social studies unit on Native Americans taught at St. William of York that year, as it had been in every parish school, even in Nancy ’s day. But she wasn’t thinking about fifth-graders, not then. They were looking for a grown-up, a sociopath capable of carrying a twenty-pound child with ease. It had not occurred to anyone that two little girls had passed the baby back and forth after abandoning the balky baby carriage at the water’s edge, or that they walked through the creek bed because their ankles were bare and they knew these woods were full of poison ivy and sumac. Helen Manning had made sure Alice and Ronnie could recognize the leaves the summer before last, after both girls came down with horrible rashes from playing here.

“There used to be a shack, a ways down Franklintown,” Nancy said. “My mother has a distant cousin on this side of town, who works at a crab house-” Her tongue flirted with the idea of invoking the name, Kolchak, and seeing if Cyrus recognized it. But she decided against it. She might win Cyrus’s deference, but she would lose his respect. “Anyway, we took this shortcut, through the park, so I remember the shack. A little man lived there, with chickens and roosters. We called him the Chicken Man. He was like some…vision out of the past. You couldn’t figure out how he was allowed to live this way, in a tarpaper shack with an outhouse.”

“It’s not part of the grid,” Cyrus said.

“We’re on our lunch break. They can’t fault us for going off on our own if we’re back in time.”

“Chain of command,” he said. “You got to respect chain of command, Nancy. We’re not even police yet. You go doing what you want to do, and you’ll never be a police.”

“I respect chain of command as much as anyone. On their time, I’ll do what they tell me to do. But this is my time, right? You don’t have to come with me.”

But he did. So they had begun to walk, alongside the creek and not in it, toward the shack that Nancy remembered. It was farther away than she had calculated, and she soon realized they had gone so far that they could never get back in time.

“Great,” Cyrus said, glancing at his watch, “now we’re in deep shit.”

“I think it’s just around the next bend.”

But it wasn’t. Not around the next bend, or the one after that, or even the one after that. They must have walked at least a mile before Nancy saw the place she remembered, across the creek and up a little hill. It was no longer visible from the roadway, as it had been when she was a child. The forest had taken care of that, creating a screen of trees and vines. Only someone who already knew it was there could find it.

Funny, she hung back at the sight of the shack, spooked by the accuracy of her memory. It was Cyrus who splashed across the creek, heedless of what the water would do to his shoes and trousers, running up the hill, eager to be done with this. A trick of sound brought them the whistle call of their sergeant. They would never make it back in time, no matter how quickly they moved. There would be hell to pay, double hell for Nancy, whose insubordination would be assumed to be evidence of a smugness born of her family connections. Nancy crossed the creek by jumping from mossy rock to mossy rock, almost losing her footing on the last leap.

In the doorway of the shack, Cyrus let out a noise that started as a cry of exultation, then quickly faded into something more strangled and somber. His shoulders sagged as he leaned against the shack, and the structure seemed to vibrate from his weight, rippling like water.

“Stay there,” he called out in a choked voice, but Nancy didn’t see how she could. She climbed the hill to confront the consequences of her hunch.

The interior of the shack was shockingly cool for such a hot day. How could this little house of sticks, flimsier than anything the three pigs ever built, provide so much protection from the heat? Nancy felt herself shivering as her eyes adjusted, trying to prepare herself to see what she would never be ready to see.

A pile of used diapers was stacked in the corner, the smell almost comforting in its normalcy, although a quick glance revealed that the baby’s waste had a sickly green-yellow cast. Plastic cups and spoons-ice cream or yogurt, maybe pudding cups-had been left in another corner and there was a whitish smear next to Olivia Barnes’s mouth, as if someone had tried to feed her at some point.

Why feed a baby if you’re going to kill her? Nancy thought.

“I don’t know,” Cyrus said, yet she had not spoken aloud, she was sure she had not. “I just don’t know.”

The baby’s eyes were open, her arms stiff at her sides, as if she had died waiting for someone to hold her one more time. Next to her was an old-fashioned jack-in-the-box, rusted at the corners. It bothered Nancy, that toy. There was something almost obscene about it, with its faded but still garish colors.

She reached into her pocket and put on the gloves they had been given that morning on the bus, like kids on a field trip getting their tickets to the museum or planetarium. The cadets had been instructed not to touch anything if possible, but Nancy chose to ignore this directive, too. She was afraid she might cry if she didn’t find something constructive to do. She reached for the box, and although she did not touch the lever on the side, it popped open instantly, as if primed for this moment. She and Cyrus both jumped at its squeak, then laughed weakly at themselves.

The monkey that emerged had a red and yellow costume of cheap sateen, and its plastic face had long ago lost the paint that defined its simian features.

“It’s the weasel that’s supposed to pop,” Nancy said.

“What?” said Cyrus.

“Pop goes the weasel. Not the monkey.” She closed the lid, turned the little crank, and, sure enough, that was the song it played.

“I guess no one knows what a weasel looks like,” Cyrus said.

The fact that this conversation was inane was not lost on either of them. But they were young, and inexperienced. The cynicism that might steer them through such a moment was years away, bodies away, maybe even a lifetime away. Possibly there wasn’t a cop in all of Baltimore who was hard enough to save this moment with a smart-ass comment.

Nancy turned the box around and then over. It was then that she saw the piece of masking tape inscribed with the proud, round shapes of a child who has just learned to write in cursive: Alice Manning. The name had no meaning to her then, but she could imagine a teacher telling Alice Manning, as teachers had once told Nancy, that her A should look like a sailboat going backward, that her M should be tall and strong, like an iron fence. A teacher would be proud of the girl who wrote these letters.

Nancy closed the lid, so the toy would be as she found it, and backed out of the house. Cyrus was already running upstream, splashing through the brackish water. He wanted to get there first, she assumed, to hog the credit for her hunch. But she misjudged him, it turned out. He just wanted to get away, to put as much distance as he could between himself and the dead child.

Nancy was thinking about Cyrus as she made her way along that same stream in the dark, her flashlight picking out a path. Again, the trip was longer than she remembered. Again, she rounded bend after bend, expecting to see the house, only to find it wasn’t there. What if it was gone? How stupid would she feel, how silly?

The last time she had seen Cyrus was two years ago in Circuit City, when she and Andy were shopping for a new television set. He called himself a sales associate and he said the money was great, better than he had ever imagined. He was good at sales, much to his surprise. “Still a cop?” he asked Nancy. “Yeah,” Nancy said, “but out in the county.” He nodded, and Nancy detected a world of assumptions in that nod. Everyone thought they knew why she left the city. Everyone was wrong. And even if she told them, they wouldn’t believe her. She wouldn’t believe it either. Who would ever guess that good luck could be the worst thing that ever happened to a person? Mistakes- everyone made mistakes, and therefore could forgive them. Nancy had been derailed by her own freaky luck.

The shack had slumped over time, sagging as surely as Cyrus’s shoulders had. Nancy hesitated at the foot of the hill, just as she had once before. Perhaps her young self had understood, in its dim subconscious way, the consequences of walking up the hill, of finding what she found. Would there be newer, harsher consequences if she walked up to that threshold again? But she had come all this way in the dark. She had to look.

Her flashlight found Ronnie Fuller in a corner of the cabin, knees drawn to her chest, rocking rhythmically. She squinted when the beam from Nancy ’s flashlight washed over her face, but said nothing. Nancy flicked the light around. No one else was there, alive or dead. There was nothing there at all. Just Ronnie, rocking back and forth, humming a little tune to herself.

23.

“She in there?” Infante asked when he returned to the tenth floor about 2 A.M., summoned by Nancy ’s page.

“Yeah,” she said, drinking a cup of coffee she had just brewed, although she didn’t really need the caffeine. Adrenaline was more than doing its job, keeping her alert and sharp, impervious to sleep.

“You talk to her?”

“We chatted, about nothing in particular. But once I got her in there and went down to the machines to get her a soda and a candy bar, she fell asleep.”

“And you let her?”

Nancy knew Infante didn’t mean his question to land like a rebuke, but it did.

“It’s weird, I couldn’t wake her for anything,” she said, trying not to sound defensive. “I shook her arm, I all but yelled in her ear, but she kept sleeping all along.”

“Sleeping all along,” Infante repeated. “Well, then, let her sleep. And you, too. Squeeze in a catnap, and I’ll keep watch in case she wakes up, and then I’ll jump in there. Hey, how’d you know where to find her?”

“Hunch.” An honest answer, Nancy told herself, just not a complete one. She would tell Infante the whole story in detail one day. One day, not tonight. Tonight, she found herself saying what she had said to Cyrus, her classmate, all those years ago. “I remembered this shack in Leakin Park from when my family used to go to the Millrace for crabs.”

“No sign of the missing girl, though.”

“None.”

“Did she try to run again?”

“No. She seemed almost happy to be found. It’s a scary place at night. It scared me.”

The girl had, in fact, lifted her arms to Nancy, taking on a supplicant’s posture that confused her. Then she realized: Ronnie was holding her arms out for handcuffs.

Nancy had not given any thought to the challenge of leading someone back along the dark, bumpy trail, much less a person in cuffs. She had assumed she was on a wild-goose chase for Brittany Little’s body. Did she have to use the cuffs? The fact that Ronnie was so ready to wear handcuffs should be proof enough that the girl wasn’t even thinking about running again. She had decided, after a fashion, to turn herself in.

But what if she did run, once back to the street? What if, once free of the dark, inexact shapes here in the woods, she pushed Nancy down, took her gun, or stole her car? There’s good Ronnie and bad Ronnie, Alice had warned. And bad Ronnie will do anything, and then good Ronnie can’t believe she did it. How could Nancy ever explain herself to Lenhardt, or the lieutenant, and all the way up the rest of the chain of command? She hated thinking things through this way, anticipating how she might fail and how others might react. But second-guessing herself was second nature to Nancy.

She had helped Ronnie Fuller stumble down the hill, her arms cuffed behind her, silent until they reached Nancy ’s car, a Toyota RAV-4.

“Is this a cop car?”

“It’s my personal car.”

“Oh.” And then, as if it were a social situation and she had to say something, anything: “It’s nice.”

“Thanks.”

Ronnie didn’t volunteer anything more, allowing Nancy to buckle her into the backseat as if she were a child being put in a car seat. Nancy adjusted the seat belt so Ronnie could lean forward, making space for her bound wrists.

“Where’s Brittany Little?” Nancy asked once they were on their way.

“Who?”

“The girl taken from Value City.”

“A girl was taken from Value City?”

“C’mon Ronnie. If you didn’t know a girl was missing, why did you run away?”

“Because you’re a cop, right? You’re the cop.”

“I’m a detective who’s investigating the disappearance of a three-year-old girl not even two hundred yards from where you work.”

“No, I mean, you’re the cop.” She waited for Nancy ’s confirmation. “The one who found the baby. I didn’t recognize you at first, but when I thought about it, I knew where I had seen you before. You don’t look much different. You wear your hair the same way.”

“How did you know what I look like?”

“My mom…” The word made Ronnie lose her train of thought. “Well, you were on television, right? Getting some kind of reward? And in the newspaper. Even later, after I was away, I saw you on television a couple of times. Didn’t I?”

“Yeah,” Nancy confessed. “Yeah.”

They rode in silence for a while. Without the opportunity to make eye contact, Nancy didn’t want to go too far into the subject of Brittany. But she could ask about Olivia.

“Why pudding, Ronnie?”

“What?”

“You fed Olivia Barnes pudding. We found these little pop-top single servings of pudding all over the shack. But if you bought pudding, you could have bought baby food. Didn’t you know you should give her baby food?”

“We didn’t buy anything. I took those puddings from my house.”

“Oh.” Nancy thought about this. Until asked and answered, the question had seemed portentous. All these years, she had been thinking about the pudding cups, and the explanation was so simple. Were all the answers as simple as this? If so, she might as well jump ahead, ask the only thing that mattered.

“Why did you kill her?”

“The baby, you mean?” Would Ronnie have to ask for clarification if she hadn’t killed more than one child? The simple fact of syntax filled Nancy with hope and dread, for if she was reading it right, Ronnie was all but confessing and Brittany Little was already dead.

“Yes. Olivia Barnes. The baby.”

Nancy could see Ronnie’s shape in the rearview mirror, but not her face. She was slumped to one side, her cheek pressed against the window glass. She waited so long to reply that Nancy thought she was ignoring the question, or sleeping. But at last she spoke.

“She was sad. She was very, very sad.”

Was Ronnie speaking of herself in the third person now? Was this the transition to bad Ronnie from good, or vice versa? Because surely a baby could not be sad, even in an eleven-year-old girl’s parlance. Unhappy, yes. Bad or mad. But who would ever describe a baby as sad?

“How did you know the baby was…sad?”

Again, a long time passed before there was any sound from the backseat. “It’s complicated,” Ronnie said at last, sounding like Alice when she had invoked her “past”-rehearsed, channeling words suggested by someone older. “It’s a very complicated story.”

She did not speak again for the duration of the ride. And now she was sleeping. Infante and Nancy studied her through the glass. In her T-shirt and jeans, she looked younger than she was. Yet she could have looked much older with minimal effort-a short skirt, a little makeup. That was the odd trick of eighteen, Nancy remembered. You could turn the clock forward or backward, be a kid when it suited you, or fool the world into thinking you were a woman. It was a time filled with promises. She had broken up with Andy the summer she was eighteen, taken a chance on the world at large. Then she ran back to him, realizing she shouldn’t reject the great luck of meeting her soul mate at age fourteen.

“First she runs, now she sleeps,” Infante said. “She’s like a textbook example of guilt.”

“She’s got to be exhausted,” Nancy said, a sense of fairness automatic with her. “She has had a pretty long day. And she seemed genuinely baffled when I mentioned Brittany Little.”

“You’re tired, and you’re not sleeping. The only difference between the two of you is she knows what happened to Brittany Little and you don’t. You think we should wake her up?”

“I’m telling you, it can’t be done. She’s dead to the world.”

The words hung on, and Nancy wished she had chosen a different way to say it.

Yes, Ronnie Fuller slept, but there was neither innocence nor guilt in her sleep, just a lifelong way of coping with a world that bewildered her. She had always been able to sleep, in almost any circumstances. She had slept through the night at the age of three months. As a toddler, she had dozed in the backseat of the family car, wedged so tightly between her brothers that her father said they didn’t need seat belts, not that the old Ford station wagon had any. She had napped in school, leading her teachers to suspect a chaotic home life that didn’t allow her to get enough rest, and they were half right. Ronnie had a chaotic home life, but she got plenty of rest, which saved her from much of it. Her bed was her one private place in a most unprivate household.

And when her youngest older brother, Matthew, began trying to get into her bed when she was nine, she used sleep to keep herself safe.

Matthew was twelve at the time, and Ronnie had suspected for several days that he was planning something for her. So far, most of Matthew’s plans for her had been cruel but tolerable-pinches, hits, endless “Punch buggies, no punch backs.” If she weathered these attacks without comment or reaction, Matthew usually grew bored and found someone or something else to torture. Helen Manning had told Ronnie the story of the Snow Queen, and Ronnie quickly saw the advantage in having a splinter of ice in the heart, as long as you could take it out at will. She thought of herself as the Stone Queen, holding a pose in Freeze Tag. Ronnie had always been good at Freeze Tag.

On an August evening, the year Matthew was twelve and Ronnie was nine, he came into her room when the house was quiet, or as quiet as it ever got, with the living room television blaring into the night, her father’s snores rising and falling. Matthew’s hands were clutched at the groin of his pajamas, as if he had to pee, and he was holding himself so only the tip peeked out. It was the same way he held the baby field mice he sometimes captured in the Mannings’ wild, overgrown backyard. Ronnie could see all this because her eyes were fake-squinched shut, allowing a tiny field of vision through her lashes. She had been lying there, barely breathing, waiting to see what Matthew was going to do when he came for her. She had known, somehow, it would be this night.

“Ronnie,” he whispered hoarsely. “Ronnie, are you awake?”

She let out a sigh, the kind of half-murmur, half-talk sound that her father made when he fell asleep on the sofa after dinner, before moving on to an impressive crescendo of snores. She didn’t dare try fake-snoring because she knew it would come out like a cartoon character, all whistles and lip-flaps.

“I’ve got something I want to show you.” Matthew reached for her wrist, but Ronnie rolled over as if in a restless dream, pinning her arms in a tight V beneath her stomach, hands crossed at her crotch.

“Ronnie, Ronnie. C’mon, Ronnie, it’s a secret, a really cool secret.”

It was all she could do not to say, “It’s not such a secret, dummo.” She knew about sex, if not all its particulars. Her mother had miscarried when Ronnie was four, leading to an early overview of the facts of life. Cable movies and soap operas had filled in the gaps, and Ronnie had a general idea of what went where, what the consequences were, and the odd effect the whole enterprise had on men. She had even seen movies on television that explained why her brother was here, in the middle of the night. These things happened in families, according to the movies, but it was always, always wrong, even when the boy was handsome, which Matthew wasn’t, and really loved the girl, which Matthew didn’t.

But Ronnie would lose a confrontation with Matthew. He would hit her, she would yell, and her father would come in and dispense slaps all around, indifferent to what had caused the noise. The next night, Matthew would come back, the sequence would be repeated, and eventually, he would take what he wanted from her. As for telling her parents what Matthew was trying to do-well, it was too shameful. Ronnie felt she had to protect her mother from the truth about her youngest son-what he did to neighborhood merchants, not to mention cats, how he behaved at school. She had to protect her mother, in general, from the ugliness of life. Her mother didn’t know how awful the world was. Her mother liked to talk about the old shows she had watched on something called Picture for a Sunday Afternoon, back when the world had only three channels. Ronnie didn’t want her mother to know how things had changed, that children were so dirty now, that there were a hundred channels full of things no one should see.

Helen Manning was clearly sophisticated enough, but Ronnie would be even more ashamed to tell a neighbor about Matthew. This was back when Matthew was the bad one, the one headed for trouble and juvenile hall. Funny, he had turned out okay after it became clear that Ronnie was so awful that no one else in the family could ever be known as the bad one. Ronnie never forgot his face the day they came for her, the stunned, almost joyous look of reprieve. He didn’t have to be the bad one anymore.

But this was two years earlier. On her stomach at the age of nine, arms beneath her, hands pressed over her private parts, he was still bad and Ronnie was good, or at least better than him. Smarter, too. She realized she was impenetrable as long as she kept up the pretense of sleeping. Perhaps an older boy, a more vicious one, would have kept going, but Matthew assumed he needed Ronnie’s cooperation. The female body was mysterious to him. He would never find his way inside without a little help.

Matthew shook her by the shoulders, hissed her name in ever more ferocious whispers. He poked her hip with the hard novelty of himself, which really grossed her out, but it didn’t feel much different from a finger, so she continued to sleep. Soon enough, she wasn’t pretending. She drowsed through his whispered come-ons, neither asleep nor awake, until he finally gave up. Later, Ronnie heard that he got a girl in his class to do it, a stupid girl that everyone made fun of, and she was doubly glad she hadn’t let him.

Even at Harkness and later, at Shechter, Ronnie never had trouble sleeping. If they hadn’t kept her to such a strict schedule, she would have slept ten, eleven, twelve hours every night, and taken naps during the day. But excessive sleep was considered a bad sign at Shechter, so she gave it up. It was part of the price of staying there.

Tonight, she had slept a little bit in the old cabin, leaning against the wall. There had been nothing to do but sleep and wait. She knew she would be found. If anything, she had been surprised at how long she ended up waiting in the shack. The sky was still light when she closed her eyes, and it had been a little frightening to wake to such a deep, complete darkness. Most places in Baltimore were louder than Ronnie remembered, but Leakin Park was quieter and darker.

This was not her first visit back to the shack. She had ended up here, almost by accident, soon after she came home. It had seemed so natural, walking along Franklintown Road, tracing the old paths. She had always felt the park was hers, a secret to share with others. Ronnie had discovered the cabin the summer she was ten, and it had been hard to convince Alice to follow her here. Alice was such a scaredycat. But once Alice saw the cabin, she began to take over, making all these silly rules and insisting on her stupid games. “You be the student and I’ll be the teacher.” “You be the daddy and I’ll be the mommy.” “You be the fox and I’ll be the chicken.” “You be the kangaroo and I’ll be the koala bear.” Alice gave herself the best parts, which she said was only fair because she was the one with the ideas.

Ronnie slept. Ronnie dreamed. Her dreams were in black and white, like her mother’s Picture for a Sunday Afternoon. She remembered them the way most people remember their dreams the morning after, in vague fragments. She was surprised, come the end of sleep, how hard it was to make a straightforward story out of what had seemed logical and normal in the night. Helen was often there, and Ronnie’s mother, and now her doctor. Her dreams were neither scary nor soothing. They just were.

Back on Nottingham Road, Alice was awake, as she usually was at 3 A.M. Either she had inherited Helen’s nocturnal tendencies, or she had come to imitate them early on. Even as a child, she had often been awake at 1 A.M., 2 A.M., 3 A.M. The night was full of interesting sounds that got lost in the daytime hours, such as freight trains that rumbled through, miles away.

Helen had never chided Alice about her wakefulness, although she did make a rule that Alice had to stay in bed, except for trips to the bathroom. “Bedtime means bed,” Helen had decreed. “What you do in bed, and whether the light is on or off, is your own business. As long as you’re not tired and cranky during the day, I don’t care what you do at night.”

Alice did not ask, but she assumed the same rules applied to Helen. What she did in her own bed, with the light off or on, was her own business. Although Helen didn’t do things in her bed. When she dated, which was infrequent, she either hired a baby-sitter for overnight or kept the men downstairs. Once Alice was in her room upstairs, Helen took over the living room-smoking in secret, drinking in secret, watching television in secret. That is, they were meant to be secrets. Did she really think that Alice wouldn’t figure these things out if she stayed in bed? The little house could not keep a single sound to itself. Ice falling into a glass, a match striking on the flinty strip of a matchbox cover, the muted sounds of late-night television, Helen’s muffled laugh, a man’s groan-Alice heard everything.

Her grandparents said Helen was permissive. Alice had overheard that, too, but it had required sneaking to the top of the stairs, something she did far more often than Helen suspected. The house was free with its sounds, but not so free with words, and if Alice wanted to hear a conversation or the dialogue from a late-night movie, she slithered out of bed, sliding across the wooden floors as if she were skating, otherwise Helen would hear her footsteps. The porous nature of the house cut both ways. The trick was to wait until the television or the stereo was on, which provided cover for the creak of the floorboards.

The other trick was to wear socks, because the floors were old and splintery. So Alice slid across them, one-two, one-two, one-two, as if skating to a waltz. She imagined herself in the kinds of outfits Helen had worn as a child, a short black skirt with a girl skater appliquéd on it, a woolen helmet that made Helen look like a bald turtle, cursive initials stitched into the side. “I hated that hat,” Helen said when Alice paused at that page in the old photo albums.

Tonight, Alice ’s knees were tented under the yellow-and red-striped sheets on her bed, sheets she had picked out almost a decade ago, when Helen said she could help decorate her room. She had picked these sheets, bold and abstract, because she knew Helen would be disappointed by the ones Alice really wanted, which were pink and covered with rosebuds and little girls with watering cans. She liked these well enough, though, and they were certainly more suitable to an eighteen-year-old than the rosebud sheets would have been.

She examined the two round mountains created by her knees. If she had slept in these sheets every night of her life since she was ten, give or take a trip to her grandparents’ house and sleepovers, assuming she was invited to sleepovers, these sheets would probably be worn in spots, beginning to fray at the edges. They had faded, but only because Helen hadn’t thought to close the venetian blinds all the way. For seven years, she had let light spill across the bed, the spread folded down as Alice had left it on her last morning here. At night, with just her bedside lamp on, she couldn’t see the subtle bands that ran cross-grained with the sheets’ stripes, but she knew they were there.

She had a notepad propped up against the slope of her thighs and she was working on a letter, one she knew she would never send, but it was fun to write because it was about her. She had told her mother, who had seen her working on it earlier in the week, that it was a college application, and it could have been, for it was an essay in which she attempted to define herself in the curiously bragging-byway-of-self-deprecating tone that she instinctively knew such essays required.

But it was not a college application. Alice was drafting a letter to the producers of the reality show on MTV, the one where seven people lived in a house together. She had no desire to be on the other one, which made kids ride around in a Winnebago doing stupid, messy things called missions. Everyone knew that was the show for the also-rans, the losers. She couldn’t help noticing that there had never been anyone-how to put it-truly notorious on the show before. One boy had a brother who was murdered, but that was as close as they had come.

Now, it would be better, she knew, if her past were more accidental, if she had been convicted of killing someone, say, while driving drunk and was now in AA. Maybe she should start going to church and talking about God. It would help if she did something creative, too-wrote poetry or rapped.

The real obstacle, Alice knew, was that she was fat. The show sometimes had fat girls, but they were always black. The white girls were thin, thinner each year, so thin they could wear belly shirts and bikinis and navel rings. She wasn’t sure why the black girls could be fat and the white girls couldn’t, but clearly there was a rule. Come to think of it, not even the black girls were fat anymore.

Still, it felt good to outline her most interesting qualities in a letter, even if she never planned to send it, and no one would ever read it. People were always telling Alice she had so many opportunities, yet the only ones they could come up with were work and school. That didn’t seem like so much to Alice. That seemed like what everyone else had. “You have your whole life ahead of you,” Helen told Alice, and Sharon Kerpelman had said much the same thing. But Alice knew they were wrong. She had her whole life behind her, a huge, cumbersome weight that she had to drag with her wherever she went, like her own body. Such a life should be good for something.

She studied what she had written. Once enamored of cursive, she had recently discovered she wrote much faster if she printed. Her letters were now squat little capitals instead of the sedate ships that had once skimmed slowly across her pages. The new handwriting was still not fast enough to suit her, however. She would prefer to compose on her mother’s computer, but she couldn’t bring the computer to bed, and more important, she couldn’t trust Helen to respect her privacy. Helen always swore she was the kind of mother who respected others’ need for secrets, but, well, Helen was a liar. A big fat liar, and for what? Helen’s lies made no sense to Alice.

Even here, in a notepad she can hide beneath her mattress, in a letter she will never send, a letter no one will ever read-even here, she does not dare tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as they used to say on television. In her real life so far, no one has used that phrase. But then she never got to the point where she was allowed to testify, never put her hand on a book and swore to God. She had wanted to, but no one else wanted her to. In fact, the whole point seemed to be to keep Alice quiet. They kept saying it wouldn’t be good for her and Ronnie to go before the judge without everything decided. They needed to reach an agreement outside of court. Alice didn’t see how that agreement had helped her at all. The truth was on her side, not Ronnie’s. And one day, when she was allowed to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, everyone would finally be helpless before her.

She turned the page over and started a new letter, one that would be sent, when the time was right.

Sunday, July 5
24.

Lenhardt unfurled a regional map across a desk. There were the sisters, Baltimore and Baltimore, city and county, joined but never merged, locked together like two chain-gang escapees in one of those old movies.

“Do you know what this is?”

“A map,” Infante said. He was absolutely earnest. The sergeant had asked a question, and by God, the detective had an answer. Nancy started to giggle, only to end up yawning instead. It was 11 A.M., and she had slept for a few hours while Infante kept trying to rouse the sleeping Ronnie, but they were getting punch-drunk from exhaustion. They were also beginning to smell from being in the same clothes for more than twenty-four hours.

“Excellent, Detective Infante. Yes, this is a map,” Lenhardt said. “But a map of what?”

“ Baltimore?”

“No, my friend. It may look like Baltimore, but this is Fuckedville, U.S.A., our new hometown for the foreseeable future.”

“Why…are…we…fucked?” Nancy yawned involuntarily between each word. Lenhardt had cursed in front of her. Things must be bad indeed. She wondered if this meant he could never go back to not-cursing in front of her.

“Don’t be crude, Nancy.” The sergeant’s correction was automatic and unironic. “The commissioner wants to do a search.”

“We can’t do a search. We don’t have any information on where the child might be.”

“No, but we do have a dedicated young detective who pulled a suspect out of Leakin Park late last night.” Lenhardt nodded at Nancy. “Good work, by the way, although I wish you had told someone where you were going. And you should have used a car with a radio. Just to be safe.”

“Pulled a suspect out,” Infante said. “But she hasn’t told us anything.”

“We don’t even have a charge on her,” Nancy said.

“What’s her story for Friday night?”

“Home alone.” Nancy had managed to learn that much. “Parents were at a bullroast for dad’s union, which matches up with what her mother told us. But she doesn’t have anything to prove where she was from four, which is when she said she got home from the bagel shop, to eleven, when her parents came home.”

“A teenage girl didn’t make a phone call? Didn’t get on a computer and do that weird talkie-typie thing they do? My kids can’t go twenty minutes without making some kind of contact with their friends.”

“She doesn’t have any friends.” Nancy remembered the mother’s sad, resigned phrase. No boyfriend. No friends. Period.

“What about Alice Manning?”

“The girls claim they haven’t connected since they got home. Alice admitted she went by Ronnie’s workplace, just to get a look at her, but said Ronnie has no idea.”

“That was weird, Sarge,” Infante interrupted. “The girl comes in here, on her own steam, to tell us this story that puts her right there a few hours before everything happens. Then this lawyer shows up-a lawyer the girl called and left a message for before she headed in here-and the girl’s suddenly saying that it wasn’t on Friday, that it was a week or two ago, on a Saturday.”

“Yeah, what was that about?” Lenhardt wondered, with no expectation of an answer.

What indeed, Nancy echoed in her head. Her best guess was that Alice, either out of well-intentioned helpfulness or a maliciousness nursed for seven years, wanted to make sure that no one overlooked Ronnie’s proximity to the scene. She had lied. Or had she? Sharon Kerpelman said she had picked her up for dinner at eight on Friday evening. Four hours wasn’t enough time to abduct a child, disguise her, stash her or kill her, then walk three miles home. But what if Alice wasn’t on foot? And what if she wasn’t acting alone?

“As long as the girl is missing, the commissioner wants a search,” Lenhardt said. “He wants to make sure we look like we’re doing everything we can. At the same time-and the commissioner told this to the major, who passed the word to me-he doesn’t want anything to get out about how this case may be linked to any other.”

He paused, making sure he had both detectives’ full eye contact. “You understand what I’m saying? There’s no advantage in us talking about Ronnie Fuller or Alice Manning until we get a charge on one of them. And even then, you gotta remember they were juveniles, all those years ago. No one’s going to be able to drop their names into a court computer and make a match. If you talk about this, you’re talking about stuff that’s sealed, that nobody can get. It ain’t public record.”

“We’re not the only ones who know,” Infante said, and Nancy nodded. “City police who remember Olivia Barnes won’t mind leaking what they know, because it won’t come back on them. Hell, the kid’s mother can tell anyone she wants that she called us because her kid is a dead ringer for the-for the other kid.”

In her head, Nancy finished the sentence the way Infante had intended: a dead ringer for the dead kid.

“I hear the state’s attorney met with the Barnes family and the father-in-law, Judge Poole, last night,” Lenhardt said. “And swallowed a lot of shit, getting them to see it her way. But they were made to understand there’s no advantage in allowing a single scenario to dominate. If the public starts thinking this case is solved, they stop noticing stuff that might matter. As long as we’ve got the damn Amber Alert out, we might as well have people paying attention to it.”

“But a search,” Nancy said. “It’s such a waste of time and money.”

“Only if you think of our job as solving cases. If you remember we have to jerk off the media from time to time-well then, the commissioner reckons it’s a good show for a Sunday. Tonight, they’ll have video of cops searching the woods. They’ll report that we’re working solid leads, which we are. But that’s all they’re going to report, right?”

Nancy flushed, aware that Lenhardt was staring at her, not Infante, insisting she make eye contact with him.

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Now, cut her loose, go home, and get some sleep.”

“I’d like to have one more go, if you don’t mind.” Nancy nodded toward the closed door of the interview room. “I know we’re heading into double digits, but she’s slept for most of it. I just want one more chance.”

“She never lawyered up?”

Nancy shook her head. “No. It’s weird. She stonewalls like a veteran, but she never asks for a lawyer, never asks to make a phone call, doesn’t seem to care if her parents have been notified. When she’s not sleeping, all she says is ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ ”

“Then why go in there again?”

“I’ve been thinking about the T-shirt we found in the trash. It has blood on it, right? Blood that doesn’t match the girl or her mother. It’s gotta match someone.”

Lenhardt nodded. He was much too smart not to have thought this through before Nancy did.

“See anything on her?”

“No, and I ran my hands over her arms while cuffing her, to see if there was anything there. But she’s wearing long pants.”

“So, what, you’re going in there and hand her a penknife and say, ‘Hey, could you poke yourself?’ Ask her if she wants to shave her legs? Make a pact with her and become blood sisters?”

“Blood sisters,” Infante repeated, but he was too tired to make it into whatever ill-considered joke had occurred to him.

“I don’t know. Maybe she’ll consent to give us her blood so she can be eliminated as a suspect.”

“Except it won’t, as you know,” Lenhardt said. “It will just eliminate her as the person who bled on the T-shirt. We have to stay open to the possibility that two people were involved in this. In fact, I don’t see how one girl does it by herself.”

“Look, if the evidence doesn’t go with us, even a moron of an attorney is going to know to make an issue of it. But if we can get a match, that’s a better use of our time than sending every available body in the county over cold ground.”

Lenhardt shrugged. “Go for it. But you gotta go home after, get some sleep.”

The sergeant had brought them a bag of bagels that morning. Nancy picked out one of the sweeter ones, a blueberry, and took it into the interview room with an orange soda.

“Here,” she said. “Breakfast of champions.”

Ronnie was sitting, staring into space. Even awake the girl had an eerie quality about her, almost as if she drifted in and out of a semi-catatonic state. Good Ronnie or Bad Ronnie?

“Where’s this from?” Ronnie said, poking the bagel, then pulling a small piece off and chewing it carefully, as if she might decide to spit it out.

“Einstein’s, over on Goucher Boulevard.”

“Ours are better. I mean, this is okay, but the texture is different. We use a frozen dough from Brooklyn, so it’s almost like a New York bagel. Which is what people want, Clarice says. She worked another place where the bagels were too sweet-she called it a Montreal bagel-and that’s not what people want in Baltimore.”

“Clarice?”

“The manager at the Bagel Barn. You met her.”

“Yeah, that’s right. We talked to her after you ran away.”

“Oh. Yeah.” She seemed embarrassed and surprised, as if she had hoped the incident would never be mentioned again.

“Why did you run away, Ronnie?”

“I told you.” Her voice was weary, but patient. It occurred to Nancy that the girl would never ask to leave, didn’t assume she had any rights at all. “I knew you were cops, and I don’t get a fair shake with cops. I didn’t last time.”

“How so?”

Ronnie shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Except you’re here. So it does matter.”

“I mean-no one believed me then, so why would anyone believe me now? People made up their minds what happened, so that’s what happened.”

Nancy had been sitting, an untouched bagel in front of her, trying to act as if this were an ordinary breakfast between two people who happened to be sharing a table in a crowded diner. Now she hunkered down, her chin barely an inch above the table, and stared into Ronnie’s eyes as best she could. They were an unexpected blue beneath all that dark hair. Her brows were wild, her complexion a little spotty. But she could be pretty if she made the smallest effort.

“Ronnie, I can’t undo anything you’ve done, and you can’t undo anything someone else has done. But you can keep it from getting worse, you know what I mean?”

“No, I don’t,” Ronnie said, “because I don’t know anything.”

“Doesn’t it strike you as kind of a coincidence that this happens so near where you work? And that-” Nancy stopped, still not willing to reveal the missing child’s resemblance to the sister of Olivia Barnes. She needed the girl to volunteer that piece of information. Sharon Kerpelman had said Alice was suggestible, that she would agree to anything in order to be helpful. But Ronnie seemed far more vulnerable on that score.

Nancy pushed the photograph of Brittany Little across the table.

“She’s pretty,” Ronnie said.

“Does she look like anyone you know?”

“Yeah, yeah, she does. A little.”

“Who does she look like, Ronnie?”

“Like Alice?”

“Like Alice? This girl is biracial and has curly hair.”

Ronnie looked confused. “You’re right. I don’t know why I said that. It just popped out. Sometimes I say Alice. I don’t know why.”

“Ronnie, do you think about Alice a lot?”

“No.” She paused. “Not a lot.”

“It would be understandable if you did.”

“Why?”

The girl seemed genuine in her need for a reply, almost yearning. “Because…because of the history you share. I would guess that’s something you don’t forget.”

“Ever?”

“What?”

“Do you think one day I might forget? A man-a doctor-said I might. He said as time went by, I would have other things to think about, other things that would…define me.”

Stumped for something to say, Nancy picked up the photograph and looked at the smiling girl. Are you alive? Please tell me you’re alive.

“You know, we found her clothes in the bathroom.” She wouldn’t mention the hair, not yet. They didn’t want that detail out. Not even the girl’s mother had been told she had been shorn, in part because her own boyfriend might have done it, just to create the illusion of a stranger abduction. “There was blood on them. And blood on a T-shirt.”

Ronnie’s eyes were wide. “A lot?”

“Enough to worry us. Also enough to test-and guess what?” She waited a beat to see if Ronnie would volunteer anything. “It wasn’t the girl’s blood.”

“How could you tell?”

“Blood’s like a fingerprint. It’s unique. It wasn’t her blood, and it wasn’t her mother’s blood. We compared them.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah, it’s amazing what we can do with a little blood. You know, if we took some of your blood and compared it to what we found, and found out it was different, we could let you go home.”

“You want me to give you blood?” Ronnie stiffened and jerked her head back.

“You don’t have to. But it could speed things up. We can take it from your finger, with just a little prick. You ever make yourself blood sisters with someone when you were a kid?”

Ronnie shook her head both ways, from a tentative yes to an increasingly vehement no. She was almost like one of those bobble-head dolls-once her head started to move, she couldn’t seem to regain control of it. Only instead of swaying gently up and down, it continued to swing from side to side. “No, no, no, no, no, no.”

“It’s just a tiny prick, you wouldn’t even notice. And if it’s not your blood-and it won’t be your blood, right, Ronnie, because you don’t know what happened-if it’s not your blood, we have to leave you alone.”

“No.” It wasn’t quite a scream, yet something in the girl’s tone made Nancy jump. “Nobody cuts me but me.”

“What?”

“I mean-I don’t want to. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.”

She began striking her palms on the table now to underscore her words until Nancy finally had to grab her by the wrists to make her stop. For one crazed moment the girl looked as if she wanted to bite her. Her small white teeth snapped near Nancy ’s face, the way a terrier might.

Then she went limp, and Nancy released her arms, letting her fall to the table. Cradling her head in her hands, the girl began to cry.

“Is Brittany Little still alive, Ronnie? It will make all the difference in the world if we find her and she’s still alive. And if she’s dead-well, we’ll go easier on the one who helps us. I can’t make a deal, I’m just a police, but it’s always better to be the one who cooperates.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Ask Alice. Take her blood. Ask Alice. Cut Alice.” She looked up then, sniffing, and said the magic words. “I want to go home now. Can I go home now? Can I call my mom? Do I need to call a lawyer?”

“Yes,” Nancy said. “I mean, yes, you can go, and yes, you can call your mom. You don’t really need a lawyer, though.”

Not yet.

She escorted the girl from the room to her desk, and let her use the phone there. As she walked, Ronnie was muttering to herself, and Nancy could just barely make out the words.

“Nobody cuts me but me. Nobody cuts me but me.”

25.

“You should go to her.”

“What?” Cynthia Barnes snapped her head away from the television screen in the kitchen and fumbled without success for the power switch on the remote, as if she had been caught doing something illicit.

“You should go to her,” repeated Warren, standing there in bare feet, his golf shoes in his hand so they wouldn’t damage the stone floor. She still remembered their consternation when the contractor explained, after the fact, that stone could be damaged.

“I have nothing to say to her.” But Maveen Little had finally disappeared, and the face on the television was a child’s, beaming over an Esskay hot dog.

“You have something to share. Something in common.”

It was all she could do not to snap back: I will never have anything in common with Maveen Little.

“I’m worried she’s not going to engender a lot of sympathy,” Cynthia said, picking her words carefully.

“Because she’s unattractive and inarticulate?” Warren was being characteristically generous. Maveen Little was ugly, pale and overweight, with bad skin and a home permanent. “Oh, honey, people aren’t that bad.”

“They’re worse, and you know it.”

Warren had no answer for that, so he kissed her on the temple, more of a father’s kiss than a husband’s, and eeled out the door, his last look for the television, which he clearly yearned to turn off. When had their kisses migrated from mouth to cheek to temple? Before Rosalind’s birth or after? Cynthia couldn’t remember. She supposed a day would come when Warren would kiss the top of her head, or settle for a fond shoulder pat, and she still wouldn’t care. She loved him, possibly more than ever, but she just couldn’t work up the abandon of man-woman love, not while trying to maintain the vigilance required by mother-child love.

This mother’s grief was genuine, at least, the kind of grief that distorted face and voice. Not that anyone could really tell. People liked to say, after the fact, that they suspected the South Carolina woman was lying, that they were not surprised when her little boys turned up at the bottom of a lake. But Cynthia knew that people’s powers of observation were anything but acute.

“Dear Black Bitch,” a concerned citizen had written her seven years ago, divining her address from the numbers on the house, visible in some of the television newscasts, and the newspaper accounts of the crime, which helpfully identified the street. “Who do you think you are kidding? Everyone knows you killed your baby and are trying to get the Black People to Riot again by saying White Children did this. I will be on my roof with my rifle. Just Like 1968. You have already destroyed the city and now the county is full of Negroes, too. When will you be satisfied?”

The detached part of her mind, the part that had split away soon after Olivia was taken, marveled at the letter’s punctuation and capitalization. Just Like 1968. It was as if the writer thought these words constituted a sentence, or at least a complete thought. Perhaps they did. “Just Like 1968” referred to the riots after King was shot, when white people ran for the city-county line, and the old men of Little Italy really did take their guns to the rooftops, ready to fire if they saw black people crossing Pratt Street.

Maveen Little would get letters, too. The cruelty would be different, more about ignorance than race, although her obvious preference for black men, as evidenced by her café-au-lait child and dark-skinned boyfriend, would draw a few choice comments. No, there would be no shortage of people happy to tell Maveen Little that she was a terrible mother, one who had earned her fate. If the crime proved to be connected to Olivia’s death, Cynthia would come up for dissection again, would be drawn into the circle of blame for the sheer sin of continuing to exist. In the end, no one who had been spared by fate could afford to believe it was random.

Was Brittany Little’s disappearance connected to Olivia’s death? For the first time in years, Cynthia Barnes had read the Sunday paper cover to cover, but she had not expected to find anything she had not known twenty-four hours earlier. Although a civilian for almost seven years now, she had not forgotten the rhythms of the local news operations, the fits and starts with which stories moved forward over a weekend. Only a high-ranking official-the commissioner himself-could confirm that the new case might be linked to an old one, and he wouldn’t do that unless someone knew enough to ask. Even then he might not be allowed to tell, because the girls had been juveniles the first time. She knew enough about the law to know that a jury would never be allowed to consider the earlier murder, not unless the girls themselves took the stand.

But eventually, someone would put two and two together, and then the calls would start. Reporters would finally track Cynthia down, and this time she would be happy to tell them exactly how she felt. Angry, betrayed, saddened. She would play up the sad part, although it was the least of her feelings. She would find a subtle way to remind newspaper readers and television watchers that she was the one who had wanted to find a way to put these girls away for life, not a mere seven years. The public defender, the juvenile master, the girls’ parents-they had acted as if they were doing Cynthia a favor, fashioning the seven-year sentence from a trio of charges. Instead, they had left the entire city vulnerable.

Assuming the cases were connected. She tried to keep her mind open to the possibility that she was wrong, but Cynthia could not see how the resemblance between her daughter and the missing child was a simple coincidence. The hair, the skin tone, the age-it was too creepily similar. She would not have mistaken Brittany Little for her Rosalind, but a nonmother, a person who had glimpsed Rosalind only from afar, could make that error. A person who had studied her, say, from across the street, or in the Giant on Edmondson Avenue. No, it could not be a coincidence.

But then, Cynthia could not accept the idea that Olivia’s death was coincidental, which everyone else, even Warren, had been so ready to believe. Cynthia had seen a rebuke, a conspiracy. “Why do they hate us so?” she had asked her father, all but crawling into his lap as if she were a child again.

The judge had patted her awkwardly, helpless as everyone else. She had never seen her father without the right answer before. But he was dumbfounded, incapable of explaining how two seemingly normal children could do what they had done. A lifetime of being a judge could not prepare a man for this. Anyone who spent time in the Clarence Mitchell Courthouse knew the city’s killers were in the end utterly fathomable. For one thing, they looked like what they were-hard, soulless, dead inside. And they had come honestly by their status, via childhoods so damaging that one wondered more at those who didn’t kill than those who did. They even had motives, however twisted. Judge Poole liked to say that what the drug dealers of Baltimore did wasn’t that different from what the corporations of America did up the road in Delaware, where the federal courts heard cases on takeovers and poison pills. “It’s just a little more direct,” he said of the city’s lethal transactions. “A little more final. But it’s still business.”

Yet even Judge Poole could not see the death of Olivia as anything other than the worst imaginable luck. Cynthia wondered if some well-meaning friend was holding Maveen Little’s hand and trying to comfort her in that inept fashion she could neither forget nor forgive. You couldn’t have done anything… You didn’t do anything… Don’t second-guess yourself… You must not blame yourself. In the days after Olivia’s body was found, nothing had made Cynthia feel worse than the people who had tried to make her feel better.

Should she go see the missing girl’s mother? She wanted to feel something for the woman, but she didn’t, and she wasn’t sure she could fake it very well. Maveen Little made Cynthia feel shamed, as if there were an unwritten protocol for mothers deranged by grief. This woman was so, well, sloppy in her appeals to whatever phantoms held her child. Cynthia had maintained a dignity that some found cold-the “Dear Bitch” letters implied as much-but that was her upbringing. Her parents would not have wanted Cynthia to sob and fling her body about like some ignorant churchwoman. A hard, cynical person-someone like Cynthia’s sister, Sylvia, or even the old Cynthia-might have thought, I’d have snatched Brittany Little, too, to save her from that mama.

Cynthia could never be that casually cruel again. Yet her sorrow for this woman was generic at best, distant. Part of the problem was that Maveen Little was white. More troubling, she was poor, tacky poor. What did Cynthia Barnes have in common with this frizzy-haired woman who shopped at Value City?

Well, black men. But the fact that Maveen Little was the kind of white woman who dated black men only made her more repellent to Cynthia. The boyfriend looked normal enough, and the jailed father had clearly passed some good genes down to the baby. But how could either of them, how could any self-respecting black man think Maveen Little was a prize? Her very name screamed white trash, not to mention the blobby body, the acne-pitted face, the hideous hair. It would be one thing if the Michelle Pfeiffers of the world wanted to go out with brothers, Cynthia could almost abide that scenario, where the black man was so fine that a woman couldn’t help herself. But when you saw one of these pale, cheap-looking fat girls with a black man, the only explanation was that the man was looking for someone weak, someone who wouldn’t call him on his shit. That was the true insult to black women: not the status that white women conferred, but the fact that black men weren’t strong enough. What kind of coward would choose this woman?

And this was the thing about being a victim with a capital V that Cynthia could never make peace with. It was such a pathetic class, filled with losers whom she would never know, much less befriend. Cynthia did not wish her fate on anyone, not even the parents of the children who had destroyed her life. But that didn’t mean she had to embrace other victims, bond with them, pretend they were related.

She had tried, because everyone said she must. In the early years, she had attempted to join two kinds of groups-one for victims of violent crimes and one for parents who had lost their children. But the first group had been filled with ignorant, uneducated people whose very stupidity had played a role in their circumstances. And the second group-well, the second group hadn’t wanted her. Oh, no one had been so bold as to say that. The facilitator-apt title-had been ever so gentle when she came to Cynthia and suggested she would be happier in another group, that losing a child to a disease was profoundly different from losing a child to a violent act.

Tell me about it, Cynthia had thought. But she was too proud to go where she wasn’t wanted, too proud to be seen as the tacky one, bringing the whole group down. So she had stopped going. Stopped going to groups. Stopped going out. Stopped.

Funny, the one person with whom she had felt a real throb of empathy was that famous guitarist, the one whose son had fallen from a window. He was successful, able to provide his child with the best, yet he had been undone by something as simple as an open window. The rock star was vulnerable, she knew, to a certain unspoken criticism. One ran that risk when living an enviable life. People looked to see how your very good fortune had caused your downfall.

That had been her sin, that was why God had punished her. She was guilty of wanting to live an enviable life. It was one thing to be proud, or vain, but Cynthia had invited the world to look at her, to confirm her excellent opinion of herself. Toward that end, she had allowed the city magazine to run photographs of her home, to show her and Warren posed on their front porch, a power couple in the new city order. “Barnes Storming,” the headline had read. After all, he was the most successful black plaintiff ’s attorney in town, turning lead paint into gold. She was the woman who controlled access to the mayor, the voice in the ear, the gatekeeper.

She had not allowed the magazine to photograph Olivia. Give her that much. She had not paraded her motherhood. But she let it be known that she was one of those women who was juggling, that she had returned to her job at the mayor’s office after a mere three months off-and gotten her figure back in a remarkable six months. If she hadn’t, she would never have posed for that photograph. Because of the magazine’s long lead time, it had run two months later, a month before Olivia was killed. One of her more thoughtful correspondents had enclosed that photograph, scrawling “Pride goeth before a fall” across Cynthia’s trim waist, which was emphasized by the fitted coral suit she had chosen.

Cynthia, thanks to her family’s churchgoing habits, knew the letter writer had mangled the proverb: Pride goeth before destruction. It was a haughty spirit that led to a mere fall.

She turned off the television and went upstairs to dress. She wasn’t sure what one wore to pay a call on a grieving mother who was in denial of her grief, couldn’t remember what people had worn to call on her. Her outfit should be casual, but not too casual, brightly colored. Nothing black, nothing somber, nothing suggestive of funerals. If Cynthia Barnes could make one wish for Maveen Little’s sake, it would be to draw out this limbo. That was something that only she could understand, that the rest of the world got backward. As horrible as this uncertainty was, the days of knowledge would be more horrible still.

26.

Although not much of a reader as a child, Mira Jenkins had never forgotten a children’s book in which a girl was given an unexpected gift of a dime. Or was it a quarter? An impossibly small sum of money, at any rate, worthless by today’s standards, but capable of purchasing a wealth of things at the dawn of the twentieth century. The girl in the book, dutiful and dull, considered various treats that she could share with her siblings-licorice whips, cookies, penny candy. Instead, she succumbed to temptation and purchased a strawberry ice cream cone, something that could never be shared among four children. The cone-surprise, surprise-proved unsatisfying, and the girl gave it away to another child. There was some moment of redemption, something to do with a kitten, and the girl vowed never again to forget the importance of sharing.

What a sap, Mira had thought at the time. The girl had earned the money. Her siblings didn’t have to know she had been given a quarter, much less that she bought ice cream. Hoarding was not wrong, as long as one was discreet. The cruel thing was to enjoy something in front of others, and Mira would never do that.

So she felt no qualms about keeping to herself the maybe-tip from the anonymous caller. If she did the work and it turned into something, she would have earned it. If it proved to be bogus, a dead end, then no one need know she had been duped by a crank caller. The one thing Mira could not afford was being seen as gullible.

Or so she told herself late Sunday afternoon when she decided to drive to Maveen Little’s house, having calculated that the reporters who had interviewed her during the day would have finally decamped. A search was on, she knew from WBAL radio. That was today’s story. The mother was secondary.

Maveen Little lived in a West Side neighborhood known as Walbrook Junction, in a complex of low-rises built about a decade before Mira Jenkins was born. It was well kept, by the neighborhood’s standards, with no broken-down cars or garbage on the grounds. Yet it was its middle-class aspirations that unnerved Mira. Every detail-the abandoned Big Wheel on a patch of dirt in the yard that was neither tended nor completely unkempt, the smell of spices and perspiration in the hall, the bedraggled decorations affixed to the hollow doors-only served to emphasize that the people who lived here wanted something more, and probably weren’t going to get it.

“I’m looking for Maveen Little,” she told the sullen man who answered the door, the boyfriend. She recognized him from television.

“She busy,” he said. The dropped verb seemed to signify his contempt for her.

“I’m from the Beacon-Light-”

“Look, she’s talked out. She got nothing more to say to the news.”

Mira could hear low voices in the apartment, women’s voices. One sounded broken and scratchy. The other was pitched lower, her words indistinct, but they sounded like words of comfort. So Maveen was talking, but she was talking to someone else. Another reporter? A cop? Mira conjured up an image of Nostrildamus, nodding and smiling at her, perhaps even handing her one of the fifty-dollar gift certificates that reporters got for going the “extra mile.”

“It won’t take long,” she said. “One quick question-”

“Not today,” he said, and closed the door in her face. In that bewildered split second, Mira actually considered sticking her foot between the door and its frame. But she was wearing new light-colored sandals that would show scuff marks. Besides, this guy would probably enjoy crushing someone’s toes.

She went outside and sat in her car, the key turned in the ignition so the radio played and the air-conditioning blew. She felt humiliated, despite the fact that no one had witnessed her rebuke. Failure is not an option, failure is not an option, she tried to chant to herself, but who was she trying to kid? Failure was always an option. She was beginning to fear it was her only option.

What if she proved to be a failure after all? At this assignment, at this job, at this career-what would it mean to be a failure? For the first time, she dared to wonder if people she considered successful might be failures in disguise. Her father was a stockbroker, the old-fashioned kind who wasn’t given to daring speculation or sexy deals, but he had provided his family with a comfortable lifestyle. Was that what he had set out to be? She had never thought about this before. Her father was a stockbroker because his father was a stockbroker.

The motto said: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. But did that mean trying something new, or doing the same thing until you got it right? Did Nostrildamus want to be where he was, or had he coveted a different career path, perhaps at one of the big national newspapers? The world of medium-sized newspapers was not much different from those little Eastern European countries that had appeared after the Cold War ended. No one knew exactly where they were or why they mattered.

Tears pricked the corners of her eyes and she winked them away violently, even though no one was watching. She was trapped. She couldn’t leave the Beacon-Light until she was perceived as a success, but she was afraid for the first time that she might not be. She had told herself there was nothing she couldn’t do if she tried, but the lie was becoming impossible to maintain. There was so much she couldn’t do, from physics to the simple act of rolling her tongue in that funny hot-dog-bun shape. She couldn’t snap her fingers or whistle. She had been a semitalented dancer as a child, only to hit the wall of physical limitations in her early teens. She simply didn’t have the extension she needed, or the right arch. There was no shortage of things that Mira could not do. Why should this job be any different?

She was so distracted by her own thoughts that she almost didn’t notice the woman emerging from the vestibule of Maveen Little’s apartment, a tall, regal-looking black woman in a killer dress, the casual kind that couldn’t be touched for less than four hundred dollars, and that price didn’t include the just-right handbag and the matching coral-colored slides. The woman climbed into an SUV, a BMW that looked much too nice for the surroundings, but Mira hadn’t zeroed in on it before.

Eyes still moist, Mira reached for her pad and wrote down the license plate. She would ask someone low-level in the library to run it tomorrow, claiming it was connected to a neighborhood story on parking problems, and for all she knew it wasn’t much more than that. But she had a feeling it was a lead, and a good one.

27.

Sharon Kerpelman was forever apologizing for her condo, which was difficult to find and not much easier to enter, with codes at the parking gate and the lobby. She also made excuses for its location, deep within the suburbs, and its willful sterility. She apologized because she expected people to expect her to be ashamed of a place that was clean, well kept, and bursting with amenities. She never bothered to explain that she had fled the city because she had suddenly realized she had endured enough charm to last her a lifetime.

That epiphany came while she was looking for an apartment in the Mount Vernon section, just north of downtown. The city had finally begun to develop some high-end rentals, but they were clustered to the east, near the water, or around the hospital complex on the western edge. Neither location appealed to Sharon, who thought her life might make more sense if she could walk to work, given that she never had time to exercise. An agent listened carefully to her wants and proceeded to take her to a series of ever shabbier places that didn’t begin to meet her criteria. When she entered the apartment with the bedroom accessible only through the kitchen, Sharon muttered to herself: “Enough.” Within a week, using only the classified section of the Beacon-Light, she had found her current place, in the Cedars of Owings Mills. Her mother was thrilled, but Sharon liked it anyway, because it was so obviously not what people expected of her.

She had always enjoyed confounding others’ expectations. Even when she lived in renovated mill cottages and tacky rowhouses, she had surprised visitors with her taste in furniture, which ran to postmodern collectibles or good imitations. Messy at work, she was neat at home, obsessively so, with no patience for clutter. She loved people’s puzzled glances when they came through the door, their attempt to reconcile public Sharon with private Sharon.

So on Sunday evening, as she waited for her visitors, she couldn’t help wondering if they would notice how beautiful her apartment was. She sat in a Stickley chair, feet tucked beneath her, staring out the plate-glass doors that led to a tiny patio. The sun had just set, so she could make out her own ghostly image in the window. She liked what she saw, although she knew being a not-beautiful woman was supposed to be a tragedy. Not-beautiful was Sharon’s coinage, and it was more or less accurate. Her features were even enough, her hair smooth, her figure pretty good. The only visible defect was the patterned birthmark on her cheek, and it was much less objectionable, in her opinion, than acne-ravaged skin. Plain might be the most accurate term, but it sounded a bit self-pitying, and not ugly sounded anything but. So-not-beautiful. She was not beautiful, not pretty, not cute. But she got by. In fact, Daniel Kutchner had called yesterday, but she was too busy to see him. Or going to be.

The doorbell rang. She had given both sets of expected visitors the two sets of codes, so she didn’t have to buzz them in. She had also given her guests two different arrival times, so she knew who was on the other side of her door. Still, she checked the fisheye, just to be sure.

“Sharon, sweetie,” Rosario said, kissing the air and getting a few strands of Sharon’s hair caught in her mouth. Something alcoholic was on her breath, which Sharon expected, but still found shocking. Drinking was so goyish. Catholic, she amended, for Rosario practiced that form of semialcoholism based on wine and watered-down whiskey.

Even when viewed without a distorting lens, Rosario Bustamante was an odd-looking woman. Short and chunky, with skinny legs and virtually no neck, she was probably in her mid-fifties. No one knew for sure, as Rosario was famously secretive about her age. She was dressed tonight as she dressed on workdays, in a short-skirted suit that suggested she considered herself a knockout, albeit one who had lost interest about halfway through the process of dressing herself. Her blouse had a small rip at the neckline and, Sharon couldn’t help noticing when Rosario reached for her, shadowy stains along the armpits.

“Did you have trouble finding the place?” Sharon asked, wondering if etiquette required her to offer Rosario a drink, when common sense dictated that the woman was probably bumping up against the legal limit already. “I know it’s a hike from your place in Bolton Hill.”

“Well, you tantalized the old cat, didn’t you? I am most intrigued. Most intrigued. Are they-?” She stopped with uncharacteristic delicacy.

“I told Alice and her mother to come later, about eight-thirty. I thought we should speak privately first.”

Rosario settled on the bright crimson sofa, a vintage piece of which Sharon was particularly proud. Yet Rosario seemed oblivious to her surroundings. Sharon wished she had offered her a drink, just to show off her Russell Wright barware.

“So, do you think the police are going to charge your-what should I call her? Your former client, I guess.” The directness was typical of Rosario. For all she drank, she was never unfocused. And she seldom spoke of anything except law and politics, and the gossip that connected the two worlds.

“Alice,” Sharon said. “Her name is Alice.”

Before the juvenile judge, she had always been careful to use the girl’s name, to make sure that no one lost sight of the little being at the center of all this. Sharon had figured out quite early that the anonymity designed to protect Alice was a double-edged sword. A specific person, a girl with a face and a name and two yellow pigtails, would have been so much less horrifying than the phantom pair of eleven-year-old girls who flitted across the news pages and danced on the tongues of shocked-looking anchorwomen.

“Alice,” Rosario Bustamante repeated, nodding as if she approved of the name and it was key to her decision. “So are they going to charge her? Do they have a case?”

“I’ll answer the second question first-no. They have nothing to connect her to this except her own well-intentioned efforts to help them. It’s outrageous the way they’ve jacked her up just because a child has gone missing and the child happens to bear a resemblance to Cynthia Barnes’s new daughter. Or so Cynthia Barnes told the cops. She’s not beyond making this all up, you know. She’s quite vengeful.”

Rosario’s eyebrows shot up. Her brows had been overplucked into sideways parentheses. Clearly, she could not have sculpted such symmetrical shapes with her own stubby hands, but it was hard to imagine a woman paying someone to achieve such an odd effect. Rosario’s appearance became more and more disturbing the longer one looked at her. There was a slight seediness to her-the odd brows, the misapplied lipstick, and, Sharon couldn’t help noticing, the toes peeking out of her sandals. The blood-red paint had been sloppily applied, missing a few nails altogether.

“I don’t want to take on Judge Poole’s family, even indirectly,” Rosario said. “That’s a lose-lose for me.”

“Agreed. I would never go at them. But I’m not going to sit by and see them try to destroy Alice twice over. They’re not the victims here. Besides, we kowtowed a bit too much to the family’s feelings the first time around.”

“How so?”

“We-the other lawyer and I-agreed to a compromise so the girls could get seven years, keeping them inside until they were eighteen. We broke it into three charges-manslaughter, kidnapping, and larceny-and gave them three, three, and one.”

“Larceny?”

“Would you believe the Barneses’ baby carriage cost seven hundred and fifty dollars? Carriages are like cell phones, I guess. The light ones cost the most.”

Rosario’s very gaze was a judgment, an assertion that she would never make such a bum deal for a client.

“You have to understand the context.” Sharon worked hard to keep her voice slow and measured, anxious not to sound defensive. “Cynthia Barnes was going to make a big stink. She was going to marshal all her father’s cronies and lobby the General Assembly to drop the age of juvenile eligibility. She wanted to make it legal for ten-year-olds to be tried as adults, depending on the felonies committed. Ten! If she couldn’t put Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller away for life, then she’d make sure the next child who screwed up did serious time. It was a disaster waiting to happen. And the kids who bore the brunt of it would have been poor black kids in Baltimore.”

“But your responsibility was to your client,” Rosario said. “Not to your future clients.”

Sharon had been sitting on the edge of the Stickley, bare feet tucked beneath her. Rosario’s rebuke was not new to her-she’d had plenty of time to second-guess herself over the years. Hearing the words said out loud made her yearn to fling herself out of the chair and pace in frustration. But her feet were filled with pins and needles, so she stayed where she was.

“Why do you think,” she said softly, “that I’ve asked you here? Why do you think I still care? I know better than anyone what I did. They had the girls’ statements, in which each implicated the other, but the physical evidence was ambiguous.”

“Ambiguous?”

“Based on the autopsy, Olivia Barnes’s death could have been SIDS. Or brought on by shaken baby syndrome.”

Rosario smiled. “Sharon, don’t shit a shitter. As I recall, there was never any doubt that the girls did the deed. The main question was which one actually picked up the pillow and smothered the child, and whether it was an act of aggression or dumb panic.”

Sharon valued Rosario’s candor, for she knew how it felt to be misunderstood for speaking one’s mind, for not wasting time with artificial niceties and oh-so-careful words.

“Alice was an accessory to one crime, the kidnapping. But whatever happened, the fact remains that she did her time-more time than some grown-ups do for manslaughter. She paid society back, okay, and now society is harassing her, trying to make her a scapegoat because of some freak resemblance and a coincidence of geography.”

“Sharon-” Rosario’s voice was as calming as a hand on one’s sleeve. “Sharon, I would really like a drink.”

It was impossible to deny such a straightforward request without asking Rosario straight-out if she was loaded. “Sure,” she said, stamping her feet before she stood, to get the feeling back in them. “I have vodka and scotch.”

“Scotch with a scooch of ice.” Rosario laughed at her own word-play. She had a gravelly, masculine laugh. Gossip, hardened into legend, maintained she was the illegitimate daughter of one of the city’s most beloved mayors, and anyone who had seen his portrait in City Hall had to believe it was true. Daniel Florio in drag would have been a dead ringer for Rosario Bustamante. But Rosario didn’t encourage the speculation, because her accomplishments would appear less impressive if there was a powerful patron in the wings, manipulating her rise. Rosario Bustamante’s official biography was a Horatio Alger tale of a girl transcending her roots as the daughter of a Mexican cleaning woman to become the city’s best criminal defense attorney. But there were tiny hints of connectedness imbedded in her résumé. St. Timothy’s for high school, then Vassar and Yale Law. Sure, she could have done it all on scholarship. But how would a cleaning woman have known to aim her clever teenage daughter at the city’s private school system? Someone had been whispering in Rosario Bustamante’s ear since she was very young.

Sharon brought Rosario her drink, no longer caring if her barware earned her the woman’s admiration.

“Rosario-I can’t do this without you.”

“I’m not sure you can do it with me. Pro bono holds less attraction for me as I near retirement age.” She bared her teeth in a self-mocking grin. Everyone in the courthouse knew it would be decades before Rosario Bustamante died, probably at her desk, or in a summation. But she wouldn’t shuffle off this mortal coil before she sent a few more judges and prosecutors to the edge of apoplexy.

“Helen Manning’s parents have money.” And Helen would kill herself before asking for it, Sharon knew. That’s why a public defender had ended up representing Alice in the first place. But Sharon would persuade Helen of the importance of not being proud this time.

“Sharon, you know how I work. I take on cases that I can win, cases with rich clients or ones that are rich in publicity. This lacks the former, and you’ve told me you want to avoid the latter. I’ve wanted you to work for me for years, but why should it be on these terms? To put it baldly-what’s in it for me?”

“Me. You’d have me, at last.”

“How old are you now? Thirty-five? Forty?”

“I’m thirty-four.” Sharon couldn’t help glancing at her reflection in the plate-glass sliding doors. The sky was completely dark now, so she could see herself more clearly, and what she saw was a woman who, if anything, looked younger than she was.

“Not a comment on your looks, dear, just the sheer number of years I’ve been bumping into you around the courthouse. You were quite the prodigy when you started out. But for my office, you’re long in the tooth. You know that.”

Sharon did. Rosario ran a farm team, taking passionate young men and women straight out of law school, then working them to death. She reaped the benefits while most of her associates burned out and crashed, some leaving the law altogether. There was always a ready supply of associates because she was a brilliant lawyer. She had a great instinct for cases that looked open-and-shut for the prosecutor, but could be derailed by a little bare-minimum lawyering. People liked to say that Rosario Bustamante drank to level the playing field, and there had never been a complaint filed against her with the state bar, no matter how many nips she stole in the ladies’ room during a trial. If Rosario Bustamante had been Daniel Florio’s legitimate son instead of his bastard daughter, she would have been a power broker in the city, rising high in the judicial ranks or winning elective office. Deprived of her birthright, she took great pleasure in kicking the shit out of anyone with power.

“Sharon, you clearly have some family money”-Rosario indicated the surroundings with her chin. “You’re one of the few who can afford the dignity of being a public defender without giving up the, um, niceties provided by private practice. And everyone knows you’re a good lawyer. If you’re intent on bailing, find a good firm with a partnership track. You know I’m never going to share the profits of my practice, so why bother?”

“Aren’t you going to retire someday?”

Rosario laughed. “Why not just ask me if I plan to die? Yes, I’m going to retire one day, but not for quite some time. What are you planning to do, sit around like a vulture, in the vain hope you can take over my lease and buy my office equipment on the cheap?”

“I could learn enough from you to set up my own practice. Or I could run for public office.”

“County council?”

“State delegate, more likely. County council is still a boys’ club.”

“It’s a part-time legislature, dear. The jobs don’t pay enough to make it worth your while to spend the three months in Annapolis.”

“But you would pay me enough. And it wouldn’t hurt you to have an associate who was in Annapolis part-time.”

“Perhaps.” Rosario paused, and Sharon wondered if she was jealous. “Assuming you got there. But what would you do for me in the meantime?”

Without realizing what she was doing, Sharon knelt before Rosario Bustamante and took her hands. Rosario’s knees were splayed-she was always careless about how she sat-and her pantyhose were an off shade of amber that made her legs look jaundiced. From this vantage point, Sharon could see the ladder of a run that had opened on the inside of the right thigh, reaching past the hem of the short skirt. Sharon felt as if she were bowing before a queen, waiting to be knighted.

“I know this doesn’t appeal to you, because, if we do it right, there won’t be any publicity. The best-case scenario is a case that never happens. The cops find whoever really did it, and leave Alice alone.”

Rosario looked at her keenly. “But you don’t think that’s going to happen, do you?”

“No. I think they’re going to find a way to put a charge on her-or at least get a warrant to search her mother’s home, which will tip reporters that she’s a suspect. If that happens, Alice and her mother are going to need a strong ally, someone who can hold the press at bay, spin the story in their favor. There’s stuff about Alice that no one knows, stuff that would blow people’s minds if we told. I’ll do the work, you can go on mike. But please, please, Rosario, let’s do this. I’ll sign a personal services contract, give you the next five or ten years of my professional life if you’ll just hire me, tonight, and let me work on this case.”

Rosario patted Sharon’s hair with a gesture that was somehow more fatherly than motherly. “Okay. Let’s see where this goes. I hate to say it, but it could be fun. Now”-she shook her glass-“more Scotch, less scooch this time.”

“One more thing-”

Rosario scowled, skeptical of being taken.

“The last time around, there was a sort of gentlemen’s agreement that the two girls would, um-”

“Hang together?”

“Yes. In a manner of speaking.”

“And who were the ‘gentlemen’ who made this agreement?”

“Me, I guess,” Sharon admitted. “Me and the PD for Ronnie Fuller, the other girl. But it was at Helen Manning’s behest. She wanted things to be fair.”

Sharon slumped on the floor, remembering Helen’s bizarre insistence that the legal proceedings must not escalate into a welter of finger-pointing and blame. I don’t care who did what, who thought of what, Helen kept saying. The important thing is that they be treated equally. It’s only fair.

“Sharon?” Rosario actually extended her high heel and prodded Sharon’s midsection with the toe.

“What?”

“My drink?”

The doorbell rang while Sharon was at the bar. She all but ran to it, eager to introduce Rosario to “their” client. But as always, Sharon needed a moment to reconcile the wide-eyed little girl in her memory with the hulking almost-woman with the impenetrable ice-blue eyes.

She hugged her anyway. “Alice, we’ve got something wonderful to tell you. Rosario Bustamante is going to be your lawyer, pro bono, and I’m to help her. The Baltimore County Police won’t be able to harass you now. They won’t dare. You’ve got the best criminal lawyer in the area working for you for free. For free!”

Helen clapped her hands in delight. Alice looked to Helen, as if she couldn’t be sure what to think until Helen showed her the way. And in that moment, in that lumpy moon of a face, Sharon saw the child she remembered, the bewildered little girl who simply could not make sense of what had happened to her life.

Monday, July 6
28.

Midnight had barely come and gone when a fourteen-year-old boy in the county due west of Baltimore crept from his bed, took his father’s gun from an unlocked drawer in the kitchen, and used it to kill his parents and his older sister. He then lifted the keys to his sister’s Jeep Cherokee from the hook next to the kitchen door and managed to drive perhaps thirty miles before he was pulled over on I-70. Thin and small for his age, with large, owlish glasses that gave him a pronounced resemblance to a young actor best known for a series of fantasy films, the boy was still wearing his pajamas. Once the state police made it clear that they did not believe his story about his intrepid escape from a trio of crazed killers who had executed his family-a story taken, more or less, from a cop show he had watched Saturday night-the boy was asked why he had done it.

“I’m not sure,” he said with a small sigh. “I didn’t really have a plan per se.”

“Per se,” Lenhardt repeated, after relaying this privileged piece of gossip to Nancy and Infante, who did not look much refreshed despite having devoted their last sixteen hours to attempted sleep. “Per se. ‘I didn’t really have a plan per se.’ I guess that explains the pajamas. My friend in the state police can’t get over it. He shot Mom and Dad while they slept, but big sister heard the shots and made a run for it. They found her in the hallway outside her room.”

“Did something set him off?” Nancy asked. “A quarrel, a disagreement, some kind of abuse?”

“His statement at the scene is the only thing he’s going to say for quite a while. He’s being charged as an adult, and his lawyer is already hinting that he’ll have all sorts of fascinating revelations to make, when the time comes. The important thing is, come tomorrow, no one’s going to care what we’re doing. We’re already B- 3.”

“Be what?” Infante asked on a yawn.

“B- 3,” Lenhardt said, pointing out the page of that number in that day’s Beacon-Light. “Eight paragraphs on the search, nothing more. Now we can fly beneath the radar for a couple of days at least, try to do some police work. Kid who kills his family trumps missing-and-presumed-dead kid.”

Nancy felt equal parts relief and dismay. “What? The Baltimore metro area can’t stay interested in two crimes at once?”

“They can barely stay interested in one,” Lenhardt said. “Nobody can, anywhere. The whole country’s got attention deficit disorder, but the kids are the ones on Ritalin. You know, I bet this kid was on Ritalin.”

“C’mon, Sergeant. You’re not suggesting Ritalin made him kill his parents and his sister.” Nancy’s reproof was simply chatter, something said to keep her end up while her morning-numb brain was still trying to clear. She loved the way cops talked to one another when alone, the certitude, the absolute conviction. In public, they had to speak of suspects, of allegations and beliefs and evidence, then wait for juries and judges to validate their work. Here, among themselves, they could speak the truth as they knew it. This boy had killed his parents. H. Grayson Campbell, the rich guy who had eluded Lenhardt, had managed to arrange his wife’s death and disappearance. Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller were liars. What they were lying about remained to be seen, but they were definitely lying.

“No. I’ll let the lawyer who rushed out to the Westminster barracks to offer his services connect those dots. He’s got a great case. After all, he can always ask the jury for leniency on the grounds that his client is an orphan.”

He popped his eyes, prompting Nancy and Infante to laugh dutifully at the old joke. Chain of command-detectives laughed at the sergeant’s jokes.

“Now,” the sergeant said, hitching his chair closer to them and lowering his voice. “Let’s talk about blood.”

“We don’t have any,” Nancy said, worried that this was her fault. “I couldn’t trick Ronnie into giving us a drop, and Alice has that pit bull of a lawyer now.” She pushed him the fax that had been waiting for them when they arrived this morning, the announcement that Sharon Kerpelman had resigned from the public defender’s office and would be representing Alice Manning in conjunction with Rosario Bustamante.

“Pit bull? You mean bull dyke,” Lenhardt said.

“I think Bustamante might go that way, but not the young one,” Infante said quickly, as if he had spent some time thinking about this.

“Anyway,” Nancy said, “we don’t have blood samples and we’re not going to get them unless we’ve got probable cause for a warrant. Which we don’t.”

“These girls were the state’s guests for seven years,” Lenhardt said.

“Right. So?”

“So, you know anyone who goes seven years without going to the doctor?”

“I haven’t been to the doctor for ten years,” Infante said.

“I’ll rephrase the question: You know anyone normal who doesn’t see a doctor? Especially in lockup, where it gets you out of stuff? Let’s get the medical records for both of them, see what we find. At the very least we could get a blood type.”

“Blood type’s only good for eliminating, not verifying,” Nancy said.

“I’d be happy to eliminate someone at this point,” Lenhardt said. “I’ve still got Bates from Family Crimes looking into the boyfriend’s priors, shaking his tree. The sooner we figure out which road we need to travel, the better off we’ll be.”

“Will Juvenile Services give us the records just by asking?”

“Maybe. But let’s get a subpoena, just to be on the safe side.” Lenhardt checked his watch. “It’s almost nine. Get the paperwork done, and try to catch Judge Prosser about eleven-thirty. He’ll sign anything that’s standing between him and lunch.”

Mira Jenkins had to stifle a whoop of triumph when she read the e-mail from the library staff: The SUV she had seen outside Maveen Little’s apartment was registered to Warren Barnes of Hillside Drive. She knew from reading the clips that Barnes was the name of the girl who had died, that Warren was the father and Cynthia the mother. And although the electronic database didn’t provide photographs, how could the woman she saw outside Maveen Little’s apartment be anyone but Cynthia Barnes? The two crimes must be connected, just as her caller had promised.

So how to proceed? If she asked the county cop reporter for help, he’d want in on the story, might even steal it from her, only to have downtown take it away from both of them. If she didn’t ask him and tried to work the cops herself, the information might circle back to the beat reporter, and then she’d be guilty of breaching protocol.

She studied her e-mail again. The librarian on duty had provided not only the registration, but also a thorough AutoTrack of the car’s registered owner. People would be shocked if they knew what computers kicked out about their lives. Here was Warren Barnes’s address, his driving record, and even information on his mortgage. The AutoTrack could also find boat ownership, pilot licenses, and years of old addresses and phone numbers. But the Barnes home phone was unlisted, and unlisted numbers were stubbornly elusive. To talk to Cynthia Barnes, Mira would have to drive to her home, an out-of-the-way errand that would be difficult to conceal within the framework of her day. Maybe she could find a feature down there, claim she was going to Woodlawn or Catonsville to chat up neighborhood sources, see what stories she could develop.

Her editor, a short, rotund man who moved too stealthily for Mira’s taste, suddenly loomed over her shoulder, thrusting a press release in her face. Reflexively she closed her e-mail, not wanting him to see what was on her screen. Not that it would mean anything to him. Her editor had worked at the paper only three years. The name Warren Barnes wouldn’t resonate as anything more than that of a well-known attorney.

“We need some dailies to get downtown off my ass,” he said. “See what you can do with this.”

This was a press release announcing that the library system had contracted for a special translation program that provided help for patrons in hundreds of languages, via a phone bank in California.

“It could be more than a daily,” Mira said, seeing an opportunity to get out of the office, slip the short leash on which he tried to keep her. “Instead of just doing a talking heads piece, why not make it a centerpiece feature? I could go to one of the libraries in northwest, where they have a lot of Russian immigrants, see the system at work. Talk to librarians, see if other library systems have used this program. Plus, we need census figures, don’t we? How many foreign-speaking library patrons does Baltimore County have? Or maybe I should try the Catonsville branch-”

“Do whatever you like,” the editor said. “Just make sure I have ten to twelve inches by four P.M. My kid has a T-ball game tonight and I need to get out of here by six.”

Mira glanced at the clock in the upper right-hand corner of her computer. It was almost eleven. Even if she reached the bare-minimum sources on the first try, she would probably be reporting the story until two, and she would need another two hours to write because she wasn’t very fast on bureaucratic stories. Give her a straight narrative line and she could pound it out. Her infamous story on the civil rights park may have been bogus, but no one ever said it wasn’t well written. Feature stories flowed out of her. So would the Barnes piece, once she nailed it. Now she would have to resign herself to eating lunch at her desk, knocking out ten to twelve inches by four, then spending another tedious hour answering whatever inane, trivial questions the editors raised. But if her boss really left at six, she could be out of here by six-thirty. A high-powered woman like Cynthia Barnes probably had some big job in the private sector now, and wouldn’t be home during the day anyway.

Mira dialed the number to the county library flack and got voice-mail. Sighing, she left a message, then flagged down a colleague and asked him to bring her a Greek salad and Diet Pepsi from the deli.

Nancy and Infante caught Judge Prosser before lunch, as Lenhardt had recommended, which made him impatient and grumpy. They could have done it with a state’s attorney, but the state’s attorney said he’d rather the judge sign off on it, given that another state agency was involved. Nancy wondered if the state’s attorney was setting them up. Prosser, a short, fat man with a left eye that wandered when he removed his thick glasses, was picking apart their request, stabbing at typos with the earpiece of his horn-rims.

“All their medical records? Why should you get access to all their medical records when all you want to know is their blood type?”

“If we specify blood type and it turns out they actually have DNA samples on file, for whatever reason, God forbid that a smart attorney says we overstepped,” Infante said, adding a beat late, “Judge.”

“Is that the real reason or a glib, cover-your-ass reason that you just made up on the spot?”

“Can it be both?” Infante asked.

Another judge might have smiled, but Prosser trained his right eye on the document in front of him while his wandering left rolled toward the window. Nancy, whose stomach growled when she was standing over a corpse, found herself mildly ill watching the judge’s eye.

“Seems thin,” he said. “Mighty thin. Girl disappears, there’s some blood on her jumper and a T-shirt, but it’s not hers and it’s not a relative’s. You want to see if you can match the type to these two girls who killed the Barnes child all these years ago because Cynthia Barnes called you and made some noise. I can understand why the city cops might jump when Cynthia Barnes called, but why do you care, Detective?” He directed his question to Nancy, then didn’t wait for an answer. “Isaac Poole is a city judge.”

“Eliminating the girls as suspects would be helpful, too,” Nancy said. “We’re going in a lot of different directions on this case, and we’d like to narrow it down, be more efficient.”

“Such as?”

“The boyfriend. It’s really irksome-” Oh lord, what a stupid word. She wished she could take it back, but she couldn’t. “It’s troubling that not a single security camera in the mall yielded even a frame that shows the girl was there. We’re also doing checks on the custodian who claims to have found the clothes.”

“You know how many kids get kidnapped-kidnapped in Baltimore in a year? I mean, stranger abductions, with ransom notes and everything? One or two, maybe. Most missing children are runaways.”

“This child is three years old, judge.”

He scowled. “I know that. But why aren’t you going after the boyfriend’s blood?”

“He provided a sample, and it didn’t match,” Infante said. “We’re continuing to talk to him and the mother, looking for anyplace their stories fall down. I gotta say, though, they’re pretty consistent. And city Social Services doesn’t have anything on ’em, not even a neglect call.”

“You say their stories are consistent. But are they too consistent? Consistency is often the hallmark of something that’s been rehearsed. The hobgoblin of little minds, as Emerson would have it.”

Nancy, having already risked offending the judge, restrained herself from rolling her eyes. People who quoted other people were show-offs, plain and simple. “The mother seems genuinely grief-stricken. The boyfriend is sorry that his girlfriend is upset, if you get the distinction.”

“He’s not so unhappy to see the little girl gone?”

Nancy hesitated. The judge, for all his bluster and bullying, had managed to identify the one thing that disturbed her about the boyfriend. He seemed surprised by the profundity of his girlfriend’s grief, almost sullen about it. On Saturday, when Nancy and Infante had visited the couple and continued to question them, albeit in the guise of offering them sympathy and support, the boyfriend had held his weeping girlfriend and said: “You still got me, babe. You still got me.” But that could be because he had, in his heart of hearts, wished the child away and was horrified to realize the consequences of seeing his wish come true.

“He’s not the child’s father,” Nancy said at last. “And given the way things are, I don’t think he was planning on being her stepfather. He was living with a woman, the woman happened to have a child. Was the girl a nuisance at times? I’m sure she was. Was she enough of a nuisance that he wanted to get rid of her, or would hurt her in a fit of anger? We can’t say. It wouldn’t be the first time, though.”

Infante leaned in. “The missing girl and the Barnes child really do look alike, judge. It’s uncanny. I mean, it could be a coincidence, but it’s a hard one to ignore.”

Harder to ignore, Nancy thought, that neither Ronnie nor Alice seemed to know about the Barnes child. But maybe that was what they were trying to conceal.

“Especially with Cynthia Barnes and her father breathing down your necks,” Judge Prosser replied, putting his glasses back on, which pulled his left eye back to center. “Very well. I’ll sign this. Although I’ll be surprised if they can even find the records. There are days when the juvenile system can’t find the kids in its custody, much less their paperwork. And they may have already forwarded the medical files to the girls’ private physicians.”

“The girls just left state custody in the past eight weeks. We’re counting on the state not being that efficient.”

“In my experience, it’s only efficient when you don’t want it to be,” the judge said, chuckling at his own wisdom. He added, almost as an afterthought, “I hope you find the little girl and that she hasn’t suffered. Just don’t be taken in by the Royal Family.”

“The Royal Family?”

“Isaac Poole and his daughter. They think everything is about them. And what’s not specifically about them, to their way of thinking, is about their race. You should hear him bitch and moan about his career when he’s lucky to have gotten as far as he did. Very paranoid, these people.”

Nancy took the signed subpoena and left. But she wanted to ask the judge if the Barnes family had always been this way. It seemed to her that a woman whose child was kidnapped and murdered had come by her paranoia pretty honestly.

Ronnie had shown up for work at the Bagel Barn that morning, trying to act as if nothing had happened. “I clocked you out,” Clarice said, and Ronnie nodded her thanks. After that, there was no mention of Saturday’s events until the late morning lull.

“So you in trouble?” Clarice asked, her voice casual, as if the answer didn’t matter.

“Maybe,” Ronnie said. Then: “Yeah, I guess I am. But I didn’t do anything. Honest.”

Clarice shook her head. She was a black woman living in Baltimore. She knew a lot of people who were in trouble and hadn’t done anything. She also knew people who were in trouble and had done something, but maybe not the something for which they were in trouble. And she knew people who were in trouble and had done the very thing of which they were accused, but still had good reason to lie about it. They said confession was good for the soul, and perhaps it was. But it was hell on the body. She had boys in her family, nephews and cousins, who had come out of lockup with lumps and bruises, still halfheartedly denying the charges hanging on them.

Ronnie-well, Ronnie didn’t have a mark on her, unless you counted her eyes. Dark, dark blue, they reminded Clarice of pansies, but not the fresh ones you saw in window boxes, holding their heads up to the sun. Ronnie’s eyes looked like flowers after a heavy rain, their little faces pounded flat into the earth.

29.

Cynthia Barnes was no longer interested in food, but she insisted on preparing elaborate dinners for Warren even in the heat of summer. Tonight, it was grilled tuna with a mango-papaya relish and cold tomato-corn soup, served with jalapeño corn muffins. The muffins had been baked in an old pan of her mother’s so they came out looking like miniature ears of corn. It was all delicious, all perfect, but the only part of the meal that interested Cynthia was the pinot noir that Warren selected to accompany it.

“This is wonderful,” he said, brave and polite. Warren had never outgrown his plebeian palate. He would eat sausage and ham and meatloaf every night, if he could. He would also weigh three hundred pounds and have hypertension and diabetes. But as Cynthia had told him when Rosalind was born, “I’m not planning on raising this child alone. You can choose your vice, but you get only one-workaholism, gluttony, drink. For I am definitely not raising a child alone.”

He had not said then what he never said. And perhaps he never thought it, either, but Cynthia did. If she were Warren, she would think it every day. If only you had raised our first baby instead of leaving the job to some dumb girl.

She had yearned for this reproach for seven years, only the blow never landed. Yet she could not bring herself to ask the direct questions that would force him to say what he thought of her.

Sometimes she felt it was these unsaid things, not the loss of Olivia, that weighed them down. Other times she wondered if they had made a silent pact to sacrifice their marriage as a tribute to Olivia. It would be wrong, wouldn’t it, for them to be happy again? Sometimes, with Rosalind, she had an unguarded moment of happiness and it terrified her. To be happy was to forget. To forget was to risk it all again.

“Did you know,” she asked her husband, “that tuna costs as much as steak?”

“Get out.”

“More, sometimes. As much as a good cut of New York strip, per pound. Of course, there’s no bone, no fat.”

“That’s true.”

She wondered if he slept around. She might, if their roles were reversed. He was, if anything, more handsome than when they met and so much more accomplished. Her parents had been critical of them in their early years together, chastising them for their luxury-filled life and the debts that it carried. But they were rich now, richer than anyone suspected, despite the fact that Warren’s victories were a matter of public record. They were actually living below their means, piling up money they no longer had the heart to spend, except on Rosalind and her future.

Olivia had a college fund of five thousand dollars when she died, Cynthia suddenly remembered. Even their accountant had been flummoxed by the tax implications of that. They had left it, gathering figurative dust, thinking it might show up one day in those “unclaimed account” advertisements. When Rosalind was born, they were allowed to roll it over without penalties.

“Do you like this wine?” Warren asked.

“I love it,” she said, her fingers tight on the stem of her glass. In fact, she knew no better sensation than the first taste of wine she allowed herself each evening, unless it was the caffeine jolt that started her day. Those were her two mileposts, the signs that she had survived another day, another night. The subsequent sips were never as good, but the first ones were fabulous, like the first bite of an apple.

“Should I get a case? They discount by the case.”

“I don’t see why not.”

A better woman would have set him free, and done it in such a way that no one would think less of him. She should have had an affair, or a breakdown, or both. Warren was simply not as damaged-not because he was a man, but because he did not shoulder as much of the blame. Maybe Cynthia should find him a new woman. A few years back, the local paper had run one of those interminably long stories about a woman who had destroyed her own health to give her husband a baby. Ill with cancer that she blamed on the fertility treatments-with no scientific basis, Cynthia couldn’t help noticing-she had picked out her husband’s next wife. With a supreme arrogance that Cynthia could almost envy, she had looked over her friends and settled on one who had never married, and made it clear that she would consider it an honor to her memory if the friend and the husband hooked up after her death. At the time, Cynthia had read it with her usual dismissive attitude toward any woman who dared to think she had suffered.

“White people are crazy,” she kept exclaiming to Warren at intervals, yet she read every installment of the story, fascinated by the dying woman’s sly cruelty. It was clear that she had not chosen her best-looking friend, or her most accomplished one, but one who could never upstage her. The woman died before her daughter was two. The husband and the friend married two years later. Cynthia gave them five years, tops. Living with a ghost was tough.

At least Olivia was an undemanding little wraith, so generous with those she had left behind. She never complained, never castigated. She had been colicky as a baby, but she was peaceful now, asking only that they not forget her.

“I love this cornbread,” Warren said.

“Guess what-it’s low-fat. And that spread you’re slathering on isn’t margarine, it’s yogurt.”

“I’ll live.”

“That’s the general idea,” Cynthia said. “For you to live.”

The joke-that Warren could barely endure Cynthia’s attempts to keep him healthy-was an old one, yet they had never expressed it so baldly before, and the starkness of her words made Cynthia want to wince. That had been the general idea for Olivia, too. To live, to grow up, to take advantage of all the things to which she was entitled, by birth and blood and class and education.

She forgot sometimes. For up to an hour at a time, she might forget that she was the mother of a murdered child. But Rosalind changed everything. She could not look at Rosalind without thinking of Olivia. She was the tuna steak to Olivia’s New York strip. Just as precious, better for them in some ways, but Cynthia couldn’t help preferring one over the other. Warren probably felt the same way, too, but that was another conversation they could never have. They worried more about Rosalind, yes, and their imaginations had been stretched to limits that other parents could not fathom. It was one thing to get your old body back after pregnancy, another to reclaim a mind flabby with fear and anxiety. They could not love Rosalind as much as they loved Olivia because they knew she could be taken from them.

“You okay?” Warren asked.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not eating.”

“Oh, I don’t have much appetite when it’s hot like this.”

“You keep the A.C. so low that you’re wearing a sweater.”

She was, a coral-colored silk cardigan.

“But I was running around today, getting things for dinner. You know me, I can’t just go one place. The produce stand for the vegetables, Nick’s for the fish. They say not to eat fish in restaurants on Mondays, but that doesn’t apply to the fish you buy on Mondays, does it?”

“I hope not.”

The doorbell rang, and Cynthia was up before Warren could push away from the table. The heavy wooden door had a small square with an iron grille. Between that and the tight mesh of the screen beyond, it wasn’t easy to make out the figure on the porch. A white girl, a well-dressed one, whippet-thin and holding a notebook.

Cynthia opened the door only to say: “I can’t talk to you.” The reporters weren’t supposed to come yet. It wasn’t time to grieve just yet.

“Mrs. Barnes? My name is Mira Jenkins and I’m a reporter at the Beacon-Light and I have information that the disappearance of Brittany Little could be tied to the death of your daughter.”

“I can’t talk to you,” she repeated.

“Not even on background?”

Cynthia was amused in spite of herself. The girl was like a mechanical doll, spewing her limited vocabulary. “Do you even know what that means? On background?”

“Well, sure. It means, you tell me if stuff is true, but you don’t put your name to it.”

“And can you use it, then? Or do you have to get someone else to confirm it? Or can you use it but attribute the information to a ‘source’?”

“I-I don’t-Look, you tell me the rules you want to use, and I’ll adhere to them. But I don’t know why you would call my office and tell us about the investigation if you don’t want it in the papers.”

The mechanical doll was suddenly a little less adorable. “What makes you think I called? I haven’t talked to the press for seven years. When I worked for the mayor, I never spoke to the press for the record. Why would I start now?”

“Well, somebody did. Somebody who knew a lot about your case. And then I saw you at the other woman’s apartment yesterday.”

Cynthia looked back over her shoulder. Warren had not come out of the dining room. He was moving through the house, but it sounded as if he were cleaning up, clearing the table, starting the dishwasher. A good habit, one instilled by his mother. His footsteps, the running water, provided cover for her voice.

“I’m going to invite you in now,” Cynthia said. “We’re going to sit in the living room and talk, over iced tea. Well, iced tea for you, wine for me. When my husband comes out to see what’s up, we’re going to tell him you’re a student in the political science department at UB and your teacher recommended you talk to me about city politics. He’ll go upstairs to watch television, read his newspaper. Then-and only then-we will talk about that.”

“On the record?”

Oh, she was a greedy girl. Offered half a loaf, she asked for a whole. Cynthia admired that trait. It was one that had taken her far in life.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” she told the girl, using the warm mentor voice that she knew young women loved, the voice that she had used on her office interns. “But if you do what I tell you, exactly the way I tell you, you’ll get your story.”

30.

Alice kept her eyes downcast as she walked, studying the ground. The sidewalks in Ten Hills had buckled in places, swollen by the roots of the huge oaks and elms. The uneven pavement made it easy to stumble here, especially in the gray-green twilight, and Alice hated the sensation of stumbling. It was much worse than falling, when people felt obligated to express sympathy or hold out a hand. Tripping just made you look silly and clumsy.

But Alice was staring at the sidewalk because she didn’t want to make eye contact with Sharon Kerpelman, who had insisted on accompanying her tonight. Her lawyer had arrived at the Mannings’ house at almost the exact moment Alice began scraping the bottom of her bowl with her spoon, chasing the last raspberry drips of what Helen insisted on calling sorbet.

“Just passing by,” Sharon insisted, as if Alice didn’t know where Sharon lived and worked, as if Helen’s guilty bustling with the dishes didn’t prove they had arranged this chance encounter. Which meant that Helen and Sharon had talked, outside Alice’s hearing. Alice did not approve of this. It was one thing for them to set up the meeting with the other lawyer, that ugly woman. But she didn’t want them to get into the habit of talking behind her back. They had done that quite a bit, seven years ago, and Alice still wondered what they said to each other that they would not say to her.

“I usually walk after dinner,” Alice said, with a quick glance at Sharon’s feet. The lawyer was wearing black sandals with low, chunky heels and a complicated welter of straps. “My mother says it’s good for digestion.”

“Great,” Sharon said. “I’ll walk with you.”

Alice could not take Sharon on her normal evening route, of course. But she skirted it, leading her through the outer edges of Ten Hills, where big, rambling houses sat back on large lawns. Once, on a summer night such as this, windows would have been open and sounds would have carried-parents calling children in for the evening, the clink and clank of a kitchen being cleaned after dinner, the buzz of a baseball game. But most of the houses had been renovated and now had central air-conditioning, so the only sound was a steady, bland hum.

“It’s almost as bad as the seventeen-year locusts,” Sharon said. “Worse, because locusts are part of the ecosystem. All these air conditioners are probably making the world warmer.”

“You have air-conditioning, right?” Alice kept her voice mild, as if simply making conversation.

“Well, yes, but I live in a condo.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, these houses were built to take advantage of breezes, to breathe in the summer heat. So you’re fighting the architecture when you put in central air. It’s very inefficient.”

“My mom doesn’t believe in air-conditioning, except in bedrooms. And even then, she tries not to use it. She says it makes mold grow in your sinuses.”

“Huh,” Sharon said. “I suppose it could.”

Alice knew Sharon was trying to find a way to talk about whatever had led to this fake-impromptu encounter. But she wanted it to seem casual, almost an afterthought. Here we are, walking along, and oh, by the way, where were you Friday night before I came over? Really? Do you know where the little girl is? Between us?

“I’m never hot,” Alice said. “I barely even sweat. Even when I walk at midday, I don’t get hot. The secret is not to go fast.”

“Do you get enough water?”

“Sure. I guess so.” She drank three sixteen-ounce Diet Pepsis every day.

“Because maybe the reason you don’t sweat is because you’re not getting enough water. Sweating is the body’s cooling system. I mean, that’s your central air-conditioning, in a way.”

Alice had thought it was admirable she sweated so little, but now Sharon was making her feel as if this was another failure on her body’s part.

“Still, it’s great you’re walking so much,” Sharon said. “You walk at midday and after dinner?”

“Most days.”

“All you do is walk?”

“Sometimes I sit for a while. And I’ve been looking for a job.” She had told this lie so often now that it was more automatic and sincere than the true things she sometimes said.

“Your mother says someone brought you home in a car one time. At least once.”

“Really?”

“Yes, Alice. Really.”

“I don’t know why she would say that. All I do is walk.”

“She heard a car door slam one night, right before you came up the walk.”

“We live on a busy street. There are other people coming and going.”

“So you haven’t been…taking rides from people.” A beat. “From men.”

It was all Alice could do not to laugh when she realized what was worrying her mother and Sharon. “I wouldn’t take a ride from anyone I didn’t know. That’s really dangerous.”

They were at the corner where the big houses petered out and a small business district began, anchored by a storefront church that used to be a dollar movie house. Helen had told Alice that she and Alice’s father had gone here on their first date to see Cocoon, and then to Mr. G’s for soft ice cream afterward, where she had the kind of cone with the chocolate and vanilla swirled together. She had been wearing a 1950s sundress, with tiny black-and-white checks. Helen’s stories were always full of details like that-what she saw, what she ate, what she wore.

“We should turn back here,” Alice said.

They walked in silence for a block, retracing their steps. It was dark now, and the drone of the air-conditioning seemed even louder.

“Alice, your mom thinks-”

“I know what my mom thinks.” Her voice was hard, although she didn’t want it to be. “My mom thinks I’m an ugly fat girl who will ride around with strange men and have sex with them because it’s the only way I can get their attention.”

“No. No. But the thing is-the only thing I care about-is that if you were riding with someone, instead of walking, this past Friday night-well, I would need to know that.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s not what we told the police. And if you tell the police a lie, even a meaningless one, it can cause a lot of problems down the road.”

“I was walking.”

“Good.”

“But it’s only three miles, from Westview to our house,” Alice said. “Anyone can walk three miles in an hour.”

“Yes, but, you couldn’t…it wouldn’t…as far as the police are concerned…”

Alice stopped and stared directly into Sharon’s eyes for the first time. “You’re saying it matters where I was, and whether I was in a car or on foot, because the police think I did this.”

“Not exactly. You’re a suspect. You shouldn’t be, but you are.”

“Do you want to be my lawyer because you think I’m guilty, or because you think I’m innocent?”

“I want to protect you, to make sure that no one hurts you. Again.” Sharon stopped and braced herself against a huge old tree, its craggy bark striped like a tire’s tread. She shifted her weight from one foot to another, digging her fingers into the straps to loosen them. The sandals had left deep red marks on her ankles.

“You were supposed to take care of me last time.”

“We did our best. We really did, Alice.”

“Oh.” Alice pretended to think about this. “So that was your best.”

Letting those words go was like the first bite of something hot and delicious, a liquid warmth that started in her chest and spread into her neck and face. It reminded Alice of the fireworks she had seen Saturday night, as she and Helen drove to the police station-long bright strands of color bursting from a center and then streaming through the sky.

But the feeling disappeared almost as quickly as the Roman candles had.

“Alice-we’ve been over this before.”

“No. Actually, we’ve never gone over it. Why did I have to go away for what Ronnie did?”

“Well, for one thing, they found your toy, the jack-in-the-box-”

“Put there by Ronnie after she stole it from me.”

“And it was hard to be definite about when the baby died. The time frame.”

“Ronnie killed her while I wasn’t there. Do you think I would have let Ronnie kill the baby in front of me? Do you think I could have stood there while she did what she did?”

“But you were with Ronnie when she took the baby. And you didn’t tell anyone where she was, even while there…even when there…”

“Just say it,” Alice said. “She was alive and I could have saved her. But I couldn’t see that. All I could see was that whatever happened, we were going to be in trouble. Trouble for taking her, for making people worry. We were in so much trouble. I tried to think of a way to help people find her. I tried to get Ronnie to take the baby home. But she wouldn’t, and she wouldn’t let me. She just wanted to stay there, pretending it was hers. And then, all of a sudden, she wanted the baby to be dead.”

“I know,” Sharon said, nodding. “I know.”

“Now they think I took this girl and maybe hurt her. Why do the police think I could do that?”

“Because cops can only understand the present by way of the past. It’s like the story, you know, about the boy who goes to market for his mother.”

“What story? I don’t know that story.” But suddenly she did. She remembered being nine, in the community room at the Catonsville library for an afternoon program that Helen had deemed worthy. “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt / His name is my name too / Whenever we go out / The people always shout / There goes John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt / la la la la la la la.” They had told that story, too, the one about the boy who never got it right, but it was the song that Alice remembered, the joy of shouting the chorus until she was hoarse.

“He ties a string around a pork chop and drags it behind him, only to have the dogs eat it. His mother says, ‘No, you should have put it under your hat.’ So he goes to buy butter and puts it under his hat and it melts. And she says-actually, I don’t know what she says next. But the point is he keeps applying yesterday’s solution to today’s problem.”

“So I’m yesterday’s solution.”

“In a sense.”

“Which means I was also yesterday’s problem.”

Sharon shifted her weight back and forth. Alice remembered how her feet felt in the early days of walking, how they burned and ached. Now they were so tough that she could probably go five miles barefoot without feeling it.

“I never thought of you as a problem,” Sharon said.

“What about the things that happened to me while I was away? What about the things that were done to me?”

To her horror, Sharon began to cry, a response that Alice didn’t crave, and couldn’t even use. Whenever a grown-up began to cry, Alice knew she had lost.

“I tried, Alice. I really tried. I did my best and I’m sorry about how things turned out. But no one knew-no one could have known or predicted-I’m so sorry, Alice. All I can do is try to get it right this time. That’s all anyone can do.”

“You’re right,” Alice said. “You are absolutely right. All anyone can do is try.”

She started walking, indifferent to whether Sharon could keep up. She trained her eyes on the sidewalk, measuring her stride so her foot landed safely in the middle of each square. Not because she worried about stepping on a crack, much less breaking her mother’s back, but because the solid, almost jumping movement reminded her of hopscotch. She had been good at hopscotch, playing kicksies in the Baltimore style, using an old rubber heel as her token. Helen would go to shoe repair shops and bat her eyes at the old Italian men who worked there, just to make sure that Alice had an authentic Black Cat Paw heel to fling into the numbered spaces.

Tuesday, July 7
31.

“This is how it works in Baltimore,” Lenhardt said, perching on the corner of Nancy’s desk. “Or how it doesn’t work. The bureaucracy that wants to help you can’t. The bureaucracy that could help you won’t.”

“Problem with the medical records?” Nancy guessed.

Lenhardt nodded. “Middlebrook, where Alice was held, is finally under renovation, and the nonactive files have been put away in some storehouse for the time being. They’re going to try and find them, but I got the feeling they honestly don’t know where they are. Shechter, a psychiatric unit at one of the privately run juvenile facilities, is stonewalling us, says they sent the files to a state agency upon Ronnie Fuller’s release. But they’re not sure if it was Juvenile Services or Health and Mental Hygiene.”

“Seems like a lot of work,” Infante said, “for information that may not even help us.”

“Well, there’s blood, and you can’t ignore that,” Lenhardt said. “Blood is good. But I’ve been thinking: This is a case about what’s not there, too. And what’s the primary thing that’s not there?”

He looked at his two detectives expectantly and Nancy couldn’t help wanting to get the answer first. She studied her sergeant’s face for a clue, a tell, and saw his eyes slide to the right, toward the stack of videotapes on Infante’s desk. These were tapes from the store’s security cameras and the mall security cameras at the various exits. They had watched them several times and caught a glimpse of Maveen Little and her boyfriend, seemingly looking for the girl. But-

“Brittany Little,” Nancy said. “Brittany Little is missing. Not a single security camera caught her. Which is possible, but not plausible.”

“If a stranger took a kid, he’d have to snatch her fast”-Lenhardt hugged a phone book to his chest to demonstrate-“and even then, she’d probably yell. It’s more likely he enticed her out with something.”

“We talked to the shift supervisor for mall security,” Infante said, “and the security guard from Value City. An off-duty city cop, pretty sharp. He pointed out that if the cameras caught everything, there wouldn’t be a shoplifter walking free today.”

“The mom came looking for him, and he said she was genuinely distraught,” Nancy put in. “She was almost hysterical.”

“Well, if your boyfriend killed your daughter, you would be genuinely distraught, too. Why don’t you go back to Westview, check out the exits and the placement of the cameras? This lady, this Cynthia Barnes, got us agitated over the resemblance between her girl and our missing one. She was on the phone so fast the night it happened that we barely had time to think this through our ownselves. Granted, the lady’s got reason to be antsy. But that doesn’t mean we need to be.”

She was on the phone so fast the night it happened-but Cynthia Barnes had called Nancy Saturday morning, saying “I just spoke to your sergeant.” Nancy’s mind jumped back to the Friday evening the child had disappeared, the decision to treat it as a homicide, even with evidence like the hair and the jumper raising the possibility of an abduction. Then there had been Lenhardt’s insistence on moving Infante and Nancy up in the rotation. Infante had followed Lenhardt into the bathroom, arguing all the while, coming out furiously resigned.

Coincidences happen, Infante had said. Look at sarge and the Epstein case. And Nancy hadn’t asked any more questions-not because she was scared to reveal her ignorance of something called the Epstein case, but because she didn’t want to find out that her involvement in this case was anything but a coincidence. If Lenhardt was making her work the Brittany Little case because of her old connection to the Barnes case, then he was testing her. If he was testing her, he must not trust her.

“Nancy?”

“What?”

“I’d like to get to Westview sometime this week,” Infante said, standing over her. “You want to stare into space, stirring coffee, you can do that in the car.”

“Look at my pitcher, Miz Manning. Do you like it?”

“It’s beautiful, Gerald.”

The boy frowned. He had a perfectly round head, big for his eight-year-old body, with close-cropped hair. He looked like a black Charlie Brown, although he had none of the cartoon character’s sheepishness. “My name’s Ja-leel.”

“Of course. Ja-leel.”

“What about mine? You like mine?” A girl held up her painting, heedless of the way the fresher colors sent tracks down the paper. She wore her hair in plump pigtails, trapped by plastic barrettes, three tails in all, with parts so straight and neat the sections might have been partitioned with a ruler. This hairstyle never went away in Baltimore.

“It’s exquisite, Bonnie.”

“Bon-ay, B-O-N-E-T,” the little girl corrected. “My name is Bonet.”

“That’s right, honey.” Jesus Christ, Helen thought. Fifteen kids and maybe two had names that weren’t some random array of vowel sounds. She was all for self-expression, but you had to know the rules before you were free to break them. Look at e. e. cummings.

She was teaching arts and crafts at a city-funded day camp, something she had done every summer since Alice went away. If she had it to do over again, she wouldn’t have signed up for a session during Alice’s first summer at home. But she had made the commitment back in March, forgetting how her life was about to change. Besides, she had gotten used to the extra money, and giving up the job was akin to taking a 5 percent pay cut.

This school was on the city’s North Side, in one of the city’s richest neighborhoods, but the children were all black. The white families who lived in the huge houses around the school wouldn’t dream of sending their children there, not even for day camp. Welcome to apartheid, Baltimore style. People rationalized the city’s divisions by speaking of the private school tradition in Baltimore, of the strong presence of the Catholic Church, but the bottom line was that it was a segregated city. The whites who couldn’t afford even parish schools had fled to the county. When middle-class African-Americans followed them, chasing the same dreams, the whites decamped to counties even farther out.

Alice would have been the only white child in her elementary school if Helen had sent her there. Which was fine by Helen, but not by Alice. The girl’s fear of being different was almost pathological. Another child might have gloried in standing out, but all Alice had ever wanted to do was fade in, go along, get along. Helen’s mother had defended this characteristic, recognizing it as her own. “Well, dear, perhaps if she had a father-or even knew who her father was-she might not care as much about seeming normal.” It was the closest thing to a rebuke that Helen’s mother had ever dared to utter.

So Helen had enrolled Alice in the parish school and watched in dismay as she gravitated toward the most ordinary girls, the popular girls, the ones destined to make Alice’s life hell once they were adolescents. But it was what Alice wanted. Alice, not Helen.

That’s why it had stung to see race become a focal point in the coverage of Alice’s crime. That was the one identifying fact, besides their ages and their neighborhood, that had been attached to the “two girls.” They were white, their victim was black. One lawmaker had even speculated about trying the two girls for a hate crime. Feelings ran high. For a moment, the city seemed capable of boiling over, all its inequities and grudges and hatreds crammed into this one anomalous incident. It was as if people needed to imbue what happened with meaning. But if Helen was sure of anything in her life, it was the very meaninglessness of what her daughter had done.

“Lookit my house, Miz Manning. That’s my house and my mother and my brothers.”

Another little boy-Dumas? Dunbar? Ducasse?-was thrusting his picture in her face. The house was clearly not his, for it was a detached frame house, white with shutters and a picket fence, a curl of black smoke coming from the chimney. If he had even seen such a house, it was on television. Or walking through this neighborhood that didn’t want him, where the local grocery store refused to allow more than four “students” inside at any one time, although the rule didn’t seem to apply to the plaid-skirted girls from the private school. In a convenience store last spring, Helen had listened with dismay as the black middle-schoolers taunted the Middle Eastern counterman who tried to shoo them away. “No mo’ student! No mo’ student in sto!” They gloried in his bigotry, turning it back on him.

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

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

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

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

“And that is-?”

“My daughter. Rosalind.”

“Does she-?”

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

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

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

Detective Nancy Porter

Alice Manning

Veronica Fuller

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No comment.”

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

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

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

“No…no comment.”

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

“No comment.”

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

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

“Why, is it wrong?”

“It could be harmful to our investigation.”

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

“I’m not playing this game.”

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

“But-”

“So I’m wrong?”

“No comment.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

32.

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

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

“A reporter is chasing the story.”

“Well, sure. They been chasing it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?” Infante asked as she crouched down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your friends came back today, I see.”

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

“Why they keep coming back, Ronnie?”

“I don’t know.”

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

“You got a boyfriend?”

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What things?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How can that be?” Quasimoto demanded.

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

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

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

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

“She.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Someone called. Someone who sounded like you.”

“Black, you mean.” Cynthia had sniffed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You should get the girls.”

“What?”

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

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

33.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Good.”

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

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

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

“What kind of stuff, Nancy?”

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

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

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

“And?”

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

“Does Infante think you talked to the media?”

“No, he knows I didn’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Some.”

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

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

“You were testing me.”

“Yeah?”

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

“What did they say about you, Nancy?”

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

“Nancy?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh.”

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

“Why this case?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

“Pretty much like everyone else.”

“You’re not like that.”

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

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

“You believe her?”

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Too much information.”

“Yeah,” Infante agreed.

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

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

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

34.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is she here? He-Helen?”

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

“Does she have a job?”

“She says she can’t find one. But you did, so I have to think it’s a lie.”

Did Helen mean to be unkind? If stupid Ronnie can find a job, anyone can. But Helen had never been cruel to Ronnie on purpose, just careless at times. She probably meant that Ronnie had done well, so Alice could, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t you-” Her voice tore a little.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You mean…”

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

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

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

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

“I did?”

“You did, baby. You absolutely did.”

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

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

“Charles Maddox sounds familiar.”

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

“That psycho had a juvenile record?”

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

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

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

“Bite me.”

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

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

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

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

“What?”

“Fuck me. Fuck us.”

“What?”

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

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

“How do you get pregnant in juvenile detention?”

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

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

“Yeah, but-”

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

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

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

“That’s the age of the missing girl.”

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

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

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

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

“Why kidnap Brittany Little?”

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

Helen Manning sat in her dark living room. She wished she had some dope, but she wasn’t sure she would smoke it even if she did. Alice would know what it was now. Perhaps Alice had always known. Helen had once thought her daughter docile and obedient, unquestioning. But that belief was long gone, seven years gone.

She knew, this time, that Alice was involved in whatever was going on. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice-that was the key difference between then and now. Seven years ago, Helen had gone about her life blissfully detached from the tragedy unfolding a few blocks away, allowing herself the rationalizations that made such news bearable. The missing child was a baby, not a grade-schooler like Alice. The missing baby had been left untended. The missing baby was probably taken by a baby-sitter, or someone with a specific grudge against that family. There was even a theory, manufactured from nothing, that the child had been taken to get back at the judge. Even then, Helen understood that people needed to tell themselves such stories in order to go on about their lives.

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

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

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

“Old as you are?”

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

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

“What time is it?” she kept asking her mother. It was eight o’clock, it was eight forty-five, it was nine-twenty, it was ten-fifteen. “What time is it?” Time for bed, Helen said as eleven o’clock came and went. She tucked Alice in and went downstairs, feeling pleased with the world and herself. She had done well for a single mother. Alice was a lovely child, even if she did yearn so for everyone’s approval. She would grow out of that. Helen would see to it.

It was past twelve when Helen heard a strange snuffling sound coming from the backyard and found Ronnie huddled beneath the overhanging honeysuckle vines. And it was only then that Helen understood why Alice had wanted to read, and why she had been so fixated on time. She had been establishing her alibi. She wanted Helen to be able to tell the police where Alice was, and what Alice was doing, every minute until midnight.

Alice knew she would need an alibi because she knew Ronnie was going to kill Olivia Barnes that night. She knew Ronnie would kill Olivia that particular evening, at that particular time, because Alice had persuaded her to do it. That was the story Ronnie had confided in Helen in choked sobs, as she crouched beneath the honeysuckle seven years ago, and Helen had never doubted it for a minute.

35.

Alice curled her fingers through the gaps of the chain-link fence and pressed her face close enough to feel the metal on her cheek, yet there was very little to see from this vantage point. Here, at the north end of the swim club property, there was a basketball court and an old shuffleboard court, but these areas were deserted after sunset. The pool sat on higher ground, beyond this neglected little valley, and the clubhouse was even farther away. But with nothing to see, there was no risk of being seen, which was why Alice had chosen this spot for her almost nightly visits.

There was plenty to hear, especially on an evening like this, when the pool’s teenagers were having a dance party, their monthly reward for all those fifteen-minute increments surrendered to adult swim. Water and concrete combined to send strangely pure sounds to Alice, snatches of conversation and music, the thumping bass lines beneath the songs. “I told you to stop.” “Diane thinks she’s so in demand, but she’s so not.” “We had to drive to D.C. to find the right ones.” The chatter was female, while the bursts of shouts and laughter were male.

“It stings!” This seeming objection, voiced by a girl, was clearly a mock complaint, flirtatious and pleased, but it reminded Alice to check the underbrush around her ankles one more time. No, there was nothing to fear here, no leaves of three, no reddish tinge.

Alice had been surprised the first time she realized how close the swim club was to her evening route through Ten Hills. It had seemed so far away when she was young, yet here it was all along, separated by a narrow strip of undergrowth and weedy trees. The sounds had drawn her here, once she figured out how to cut through people’s yards and driveways to reach the unclaimed land that buffered the club. That had been nerve-racking at first, but Alice had learned to vary the routes she took each night. She also had a lie at the ready if anyone challenged her. She was looking for a cat or a dog. Nothing more serious than that. After all, if you said you were looking for a little brother or sister, people might actually care. Her fictional cat was black, except for a spot of white on its chest, and wore a blue collar with a round silver tag that identified it as Stella. Her made-up dog was a collie named Max.

So far, however, no one had asked. Sometimes Alice drew a puzzled look from a homeowner watering her garden, or a man stealing a smoke at the edge of his own property. Alice, plain and fat, was as good as invisible. She had resented this once, even after finally finding someone who didn’t agree, who praised her eyes, who loved her body. But this quality had come in handy when she was on her quest.

She heard a rustling sound in the wooded no-man’s-land behind her and turned, ready to tell her story. A collie named Max, a cat named Stella. The cat has a blue collar. We call her Stella because my mom says she always wanted to have a cat named Stella, so she could go in the backyard at night and yell “Stella.” That makes her laugh. I don’t know why. Helen had, in fact, told Alice she would name a cat Stella, if she had a cat. But she had allergies.

The person coming toward her was thin and not very tall. Alice didn’t need to see the face to figure out it was Ronnie Fuller. No need to make excuses to Ronnie about why she was here. She wouldn’t waste a good lie on Ronnie.

“What are you doing here?” Alice asked, her voice soft yet belligerent. It was, in fact, Ronnie’s old tone, the one she had used to bluff and bully when they were children, back when Alice was a little scared of her. She wasn’t scared of Ronnie anymore, not really, just angry.

“Looking for you.”

“We’re not supposed to talk to each other.”

“It’s not a rule.” Ronnie’s voice scaled up, however, as if she wasn’t sure. “It’s not”-she groped for a word-“a condition, or anything. It was just, like, advice.”

“It’s good advice. For me. If I don’t have anything to do with you, I won’t get into trouble.”

“I’m not-I haven’t-I didn’t do anything.”

Something in Ronnie’s voice suggested she knew Alice had.

“Really? The police think you did. The police asked me lots of questions about you and the missing girl.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Ronnie repeated.

“It happened near where you worked.”

“It was near where about a thousand people work, I guess.”

The pool area was illuminated at night, but there were no lights here at the edges, so Alice could not make out Ronnie’s expression. The old Ronnie had been more likely to hit or pinch when contradicted, blubbering wordlessly. It was disorienting to see her stand her ground. Alice had been prepared to fight the old Ronnie in the old way, using words, piling them on until Ronnie was confused. But Ronnie seemed comfortable with words now.

“There’s only one person like you who works near Westview.”

“What do you mean?”

“A baby-stealer. A baby-killer.”

Ronnie’s voice trembled. “You know I never wanted to-”

“But you did. You held a pillow over her face until she stopped breathing. That makes you a baby-killer. Not me. I wasn’t there. Remember? I wasn’t even there.”

“It was your idea.” But she was growing tentative, betraying her uncertainty. “You told me to do it.”

Alice put on a grown-up’s prissy, reproving voice. “If Alice told you to jump off a building, would you do that? If Alice told you to play with matches, would you do that? If Alice told you-”

“Shut up.”

Ronnie’s voice was almost a shriek, loud and sharp enough to carry to the pool. For a second or two, it felt as if everyone was holding their breath, Alice and Ronnie included, waiting to see if something was about to happen. But no footsteps came toward them, and the noise around the pool soon started again.

“I don’t want to talk about what happened in the past,” Ronnie said, dragging the words out as if they hurt. “It’s over, and we can’t change it. But what’s happening now-if you did it, you have to tell them. You have to take them to the missing girl, and let her mother know where she is. You can’t blame me for this.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Well, I didn’t do anything last time, and I got blamed.” Alice put on her bland, obstinate voice, the one she used whenever pressed to give answers she didn’t want to provide. You have to tell us what happened, Alice. Why? So we can take steps, punish the man who did this. But I wanted him to do it. I love him, and I don’t want you to punish him. You can’t love him. Why? Because he doesn’t love you. But he does, he said so. Alice, we have to know what happened. Why?

“It was your idea,” Ronnie said.

“Prove it.”

“You told me what to do, how to do it. You said it had to be done.”

Alice shrugged, her gaze fixed on the pool.

“Look, I don’t care about then.” Ronnie’s voice was increasingly desperate. “I care about now. If you don’t tell the truth, the police are going to keep coming to where I work, and I’m going to lose my job. Or the newspaper will write about us-”

“Really?” Alice had thought there would be newspapers and television shows eventually, but not so soon.

“Really. I went to see Helen and she said-”

“Why did you go see my mom?”

“Because I was looking for you. And Helen said-”

She hated to hear her mother’s name in Ronnie’s mouth. She wanted to yank it from her, scream “Snatch pops, no snatch backs” the way the tough kids did when they stole Popsicles and candy bars. “You shouldn’t call her that. Even now. She’s my mother. She’s a grown-up.”

“Helen said-”

“She’s my mom. Not yours. You have your own mother and a father, too. All I have is a mother. She’s mine. Stay away from her. Can’t you just stay away? You don’t even live next door anymore. There’s no reason for you to be hanging around.”

“I just-” Ronnie was stuttering and lost, the way she had been in class, when sister’s questions came too fast. When Ronnie began to fall behind, she could never catch up.

“My mom didn’t even approve of you.”

“Alice-”

“She felt sorry for you. That’s why she made me play with you, that’s why she let you spend time at our house.”

“I don’t-”

“Because she felt bad for how awful and nasty your family was, and how you didn’t have any real friends. But she never liked you. She made fun of you behind your back.”

“No. No, she wouldn’t do that.”

Alice had thought her final accusation would unhinge Ronnie, but she was suddenly quiet, thoughtful, dangerously close to being in control. “She liked me. She told me all the time how much she liked me. She said I was more like her than you.”

Now it was Alice’s shriek that cut through the night air. “She didn’t, she didn’t, she didn’t! You’re such a liar. You were always a liar and a loser, the girl that no one chose for sides or partners. My mom couldn’t possibly like you.”

Again, the voices around the pool stilled, waiting. Again, they resumed. Alice lowered her voice.

“Do you know why you did it? Why I told you to do it?”

“You said the baby was sick and unhappy-”

Alice’s voice, while low, was triumphant. “I made all that up. Because I knew they would take you away. I thought they would lock you up forever and I wouldn’t have to see you anymore. I didn’t know you’d be smart enough to steal my jack-in-the-box and leave it there. Otherwise, I could have said I was never there and they would have believed me because it would have been my word against yours.”

“I didn’t-I never-the jack-in-the-box wasn’t what I wanted-”

Flashlight beams suddenly began cutting paths through the woods, playing across the fence, landing only a few feet from where Alice and Ronnie stood.

“Alice? Alice Manning?” a woman’s voice called.

“It’s the police,” Alice hissed, her eyes bright with excitement. “They’re coming for you. They know who you are and what you did. They’re going to lock you up forever this time. And the newspapers are going to write about you, and everyone will know. Ronnie Fuller killed a baby. Ronnie Fuller, nobody else. Now she’s taken another baby, and she’ll probably kill her, too.”

“I didn’t.”

“I’m going to tell them you told me as much. I’m going to tell them that you said you took the girl and chopped her in little pieces and threw her in the incinerator. I’m going to tell them you did it because she looks half black and you hate black people, always have, just like last time. You told me you hate it when black people and white people have babies together. I’m going to tell them-”

But Ronnie didn’t wait to hear the rest of Alice’s manufactured history. She turned and ran, away from the lights, indifferent to the twisted vines beneath her feet. She moved with surprising grace through the dark trees, barely making any sound.

“Hurry, she’s getting away!” Alice cried out in the direction of the lights. “We’re over here, near the fence. Hurry!”

It sounded as if a dozen people were rushing toward her, but it was only two, the police detectives who had talked to her before Sharon said they couldn’t anymore.

“Alice Manning?” the female detective asked, as if she didn’t already know who she was.

“Ronnie was just here. Ronnie’s getting away. Ronnie told me-”

The detectives turned, shining their beams in several directions, but Ronnie had moved so swiftly through the trees that there was nothing to see.

“We’ll send a patrol to her house,” the woman said. She had her hand on Alice’s wrist. Why was she holding on to Alice when she should be chasing Ronnie?

“We want to talk to you,” the man said. “We need to ask you about something we found in your file from Middlebrook.”

“What file?”

“Your medical records.”

“Oh.”

“Would you mind coming with us back to headquarters?” The woman made it sound like a question, but Alice had a feeling it wasn’t. “You can call your lawyer from there if you need to. But we really need to talk to you.”

Alice turned her gaze back to the fence. The teenagers who had been allowed to take over the pool for the evening were standing at the deep end, looking toward the woods, their hands shielding their eyes as they tried to make sense of the light and noise coming from Alice’s side of the fence. She did not actually know any of them, but she might have. Her old friends from St. William of York could be among the bikini-clad girls. One of the boys could have been her boyfriend, if she didn’t already have one. She imagined confiding in one of these girls: “I have a boyfriend who’s six years older than I am. He has a pickup truck, and he takes me out driving, and he wants to marry me.” The last was not exactly true, but it was true enough. He would marry her, if she told him that’s what he had to do. He would do anything she told him to do. So would Helen, and Sharon, and even her new lawyer, that ugly woman who smelled bad. For once, everyone had to do what she said.

It was nice, being in charge, on the verge of getting the recognition she deserved. Finally, the world was going to know what it had done to her, and she was going to be compensated. She would probably be very rich when this was all over, not to mention famous. She would be on talk shows, where a professional would do her makeup, maybe even pick out her clothes.

Although, if she had a say in it, if she could change who she was and what had happened to her, she’d rather just be eighteen and thin enough to wear a bikini.

“Did you match the blood?” she asked the detectives, curious to know how they had gotten ahead of her, not that it would make much difference. “Is that how you found out? Did you get his blood?”

The man and the woman exchanged a look, but said nothing, just held out their arms to her to help her back through the woods, as if she didn’t know the way in and out better than anyone. They climbed the hill to the roadside, a detective on either side of Alice, holding tight to her upper arms. It was like The Wizard of Oz, Alice thought, except they didn’t skip.

36.

“It’s my baby,” Alice said. “You can’t arrest someone for taking her own baby.”

“Sure you can,” Nancy said. “Only this isn’t your baby. And even if it were, it wouldn’t be legal for you to take her, to hurt her, or put her somewhere she isn’t safe.”

“She’s my baby.” Alice spoke in a monotone, as if the conversation bored her. “It took me a long time to find her, but now that I have, you can’t make me give her back. I never wanted to give her up in the first place.”

“Alice…” Sharon put a cautionary hand on her shoulder, but Alice shook it off. On Alice’s left, Rosario Bustamante rolled her eyes and looked around the interview room, as if hopeful a bar might suddenly materialize. She had arrived on a wave of gin fumes, Nancy couldn’t help noticing, but there was nothing to suggest that the older woman was the least bit impaired. She looked rumpled, but no more so than Sharon, who had been getting ready for bed when summoned here.

“She’s my baby,” Alice said. “I knew it the moment I saw her.”

Alice had been repeating this one assertion over and over, her own Baltimore catechism, refusing to elaborate, indifferent to the evidence the detectives offered to the contrary. Told that the DNA evidence had already established Brittany Little was, in fact, the daughter of Maveen Little, Alice had shrugged and said: “Then you did it wrong. You better double-check.” Asked where the child was, she said she wouldn’t admit to anything until they conceded the girl was hers.

And so they had gone, around and around, until it was going on eleven o’clock.

“Look, this isn’t productive,” Sharon said. “Make us an offer. Maybe a misdemeanor.”

“What misdemeanor?” Nancy’s voice was hoarse from exhaustion, and she sounded a decade older than she had that morning. It was a good effect, actually. She wished she could cultivate it at will. “She’s all but confessed that she took the child. There’s no turning back from that.”

“She’s confused, she’s suggestible. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

“I know exactly what I’m saying,” Alice said. “That girl is my baby. They took her away from me so no one would find out what happened to me when I was in Middlebrook. But now everyone is going to know.”

Frustrated by the girl’s stubborn will, Nancy left the interview room. Helen Manning was sitting with Infante, drinking a soda, as carefree as if she were just passing time in some teachers’ lounge. Infante’s jowls were blue-black, the bags under his eyes darker still, his hair shiny from being slicked back with his palms over and over again. He looked like the world’s most tired werewolf. Nancy tapped him on the shoulder and nodded toward the interview room. They had been taking turns all evening, spelling one another. Lenhardt had come in, but even he conceded he had nothing to bring to the interviews. Nancy and Infante were marathon dancers, obligated to shuffle to the end together or be disqualified.

“What’s this about the baby, Mrs. Manning?” Nancy asked, sliding into the chair Infante had vacated. “Why does Alice think this child is hers?”

“Please-call me Helen. I think of Mrs. Manning as my mother.”

She had made this plea before, more than once, but Nancy continued to ignore it. “Why does Alice think this baby is hers?”

“Oh, she doesn’t really. I mean, she’s very fixated on this issue, but she knows her child was put up for adoption. She thinks because she never named the father that the adoption wasn’t legal. But given Alice’s circumstances, I had the power of attorney. If she hadn’t hidden the pregnancy from me into her third trimester, I would have forced her to get an abortion.”

Nancy wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Alice had concealed her pregnancy for just that reason.

“She got pregnant while in the juvenile facility?”

“Oh, yes. Shocking, isn’t it? We begged Alice to tell us who the father was. Because lord knows, he might still be out there, preying on other girls. But she was quite stubborn. She thinks the man loved her. Which I’m sure is what he told her. Don’t they always? It was a mess, actually, getting the courts to allow the adoption. But Sharon helped.”

“So who adopted the child?”

“Not this Maveen Little woman. This is not Alice’s baby.”

“We know that.” It was hard, concealing her exasperation with Helen Manning. But any sign of irritation only wounded the woman, bringing on a pretty fit of weeping that slowed everything down. “But do you know who did? Was it an open adoption?”

“Oh, no, it was confidential. I wanted Alice to move on, to forget about it.”

“So why is Alice so convinced that Brittany Little is her child?”

Helen Manning lied so badly, so baldly, that there was almost a perverse charm to it. Now, for example, her eyes drifted to the acoustic ceiling tiles overhead as if they were the most fascinating bit of decor she had ever seen.

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“You know, we’ve been very patient with you, Mrs. Manning.”

“Helen.”

“We’ve been very patient with you, Mrs. Manning,” Nancy repeated. “We have not treated you as an accessory to this crime, or accused you of shielding your daughter or withholding information we need. But that moment is coming, sooner rather than later. The time is past where you can keep anything from us, for any reason.”

“Alice doesn’t confide in anyone, even me.” Helen leaned forward and lowered her voice. “She’s always been a little secretive. Self-contained. And she’s not the most, well, normal young woman. This could be all in her head. She may not have anything to do with the kidnapping. She could think the girl is hers because she saw her on television, and it got all mixed up in her head.”

“Why would she even think that?”

Helen sighed, looked away. Now it was a poster on the wall, an admonition to wear seat belts, that demanded her unwavering gaze.

“You have to understand. She had been obsessive on this topic since she came home. Where was her baby? What had happened to it? How could I give it up? Why hadn’t I kept the child and raised it? She wouldn’t leave it alone, and the simple truth-that the child had been put up for adoption and I had no idea where she was-didn’t satisfy her. She kept hounding me for answers. I had to tell her something.”

“And?”

“I made up a little story that would provide a sense of closure. So I said I had seen her little girl in the Catonsville area-they have such pretty houses over there, lovely old Victorians. I knew Alice would like that. I said the baby had wonderful parents and she was beautiful, with café-au-lait skin and amber hair, which fell in ringlets. Oh-and that she had a birthmark on her left shoulder blade, like a little shadow of her heart.”

“And how did you come up with a description of a child who happened to match Rosalind Barnes so closely? Sheer coincidence?”

“Well, yes and no.”

Helen Manning was flirtatious in her candor, peering at Nancy with rounded eyes, as if she were a child who was always forgiven for her transgressions.

“You see, I saw the other mother in the grocery store one day, around the time Alice came home.”

“The other mother?”

“You know. Cynthia Barnes. The one whose child Alice…” Helen Manning’s eyes traveled back to the ceiling for a second, but not in search of a lie this time. She was pausing to allow Nancy the chance to finish her thought. “Anyway, she was with this little girl. And I thought to myself: ‘That child would not exist if it weren’t for Alice.’ ”

“What?”

“Think about it. The Barnes mother had a baby in her forties, four years after the other girl died. Which isn’t to say that what Alice did can be rationalized in any way. But the fact remains. A baby died, and it was my daughter’s fault. I never lost sight of that. But another child lives, a beautiful child, and I’m not sure she would if it weren’t for Alice. My daughter helped to bring that little life into the world. In a sense. I didn’t see the harm in using that child’s description to assuage Alice’s unhappiness.”

“But what about the birthmark? Where did that come from?” Nancy was thinking of the tips that had come in over the past four days, stories of other curly-headed girls who had disappeared, then reappeared. One, in the Catonsville library, had her shirt on inside-out when she was found. It must have been Alice, looking for the telltale heart.

“Oh, I made that up. I told Alice that the mark was like a little shadow of her own heart and she should feel happy, knowing that her daughter would always have this shadow heart.”

Helen Manning looked at Nancy with bright, hopeful eyes, as if she expected to be praised for her imagination and tenderness. Nancy said nothing, didn’t even bother to excuse herself as she stood up and walked back into the interview room.

In a matter of minutes, a defeated Alice Manning had finally let go of all the secrets she held, the old and the not-so-old. She told them of the man who had seduced her, the man she had protected because she loved him, a man who would now do whatever she told him as long as she didn’t give away his name. She told of her long walks through Baltimore, looking for a girl with amber ringlets, a girl with the birthmark her mother had described. Brittany Little did not have a heart-shaped birthmark, but she had an oversized mole on her back. Alice figured it must have changed since her mother saw it last.

Once Alice had found the child she believed to be hers, she hid in the bathroom and waited for the baby’s father to come and get them, bringing new clothes. Summoned from his current landscaping job on his cell phone, he had cut his hand badly as he put away his tools, possibly because he could never decide what he feared more, Alice’s love or Alice’s threats. The wound on his hand opened again as he trimmed the girl’s hair with his pruning shears. The blood on the T-shirt was his, and Alice had assumed that DNA testing would show it matched the missing girl’s. She believed the police had found the baby’s father, and thus found her. She still believed it, even now. He had driven her home in plenty of time to meet Sharon for dinner.

“And then what happened?”

“He took her to where he lives, down south, to wait.”

“Wait for what, Alice?” The girl was an endless source of amazement to Nancy. What had she expected, what did she want? A new life, or her old one?

“We were going to prove she was ours, and make them give her back to us. And maybe give us money, too, because it was wrong, what happened to me. Rodrigo was working for the state when we…met. They let me get pregnant, then they took my baby away. I didn’t say they could. I wanted to keep her.”

“Why?”

Alice looked as if she found Nancy stupid beyond belief. “Because she was mine.”

“You said they’re down south. In Maryland? Virginia? Someplace farther still? We need to know where the girl is, Alice.”

She started to answer, but Rosario Bustamante actually placed a hand, loaded with grimy rings, over Alice’s mouth.

“Before she tells you that,” the old lawyer said, “let’s discuss what you’re willing to do for my client, now that she’s cooperating.”

The house in Waldorf was a rental, a shabby one, the kind of place that landlords could foist off on recent immigrants, comfortable in the knowledge they would never complain. Even the legal ones didn’t know their rights, didn’t understand that broken plumbing and lead paint were not things they had to endure. Rodrigo Benitez was in the country legally, but some of his roommates were not, and they fled into the night when the police cars began arriving outside the shack, running across the same tobacco fields where some of them had first found work.

The old woman stayed, the child in her lap. She did not know why Rodrigo had brought her this child and demanded she care for it. He said it was his daughter, and that the girl’s mother was in trouble. He swore he had done nothing wrong, despite all signs to the contrary-his nervousness, his odd comings and goings over the weekend. Then, yesterday evening, Rodrigo had simply disappeared, and she knew her grandson had lied. He was in trouble, which meant she was in trouble, and it would be only a matter of time before police officers came, screaming questions at her. In the meantime, the child cried for her mother, cried constantly, but little else she said made sense to the abuelita. She tried to comfort her as best she could.

Yet she had promised Rodrigo she would care for the child, no matter what. So when the police arrived, she did just that, holding the girl tightly to her, shaking her head, incapable of making sense even of the halting Spanish spoken by one of the uniformed men. The girl clung back. She was three years old and in the course of four days she had been taken from her mother and brought to a house of strange smells, and now she saw that someone else was going to take her yet again. This unknown place suddenly became desirable, an island of certainty, even if people here spoke mysterious words, full of vowels, and she was given soft, mashed brown food, which looked like pudding but had no sweetness to it. Brittany Little held the old woman, refusing to let go until a blond woman with a round, tired face held out her arms and spoke her name.

“It’s okay, Brittany. Your mom is outside, waiting for you. Come to your mother, Brittany.”

Maveen Little was reunited with her daughter in a patrol car outside the shack in Waldorf. It was a messy, incoherent moment, with the woman more hysterical than grateful, her emotions out of sync from fatigue and worry. Nancy understood how she felt. The child had been found, Tuesday was now Wednesday, but Nancy still had to process Alice’s arrest before she could go home. Still, it had been her decision to drive the fifty-odd miles to Charles County, to see this moment firsthand. She didn’t need Lenhardt to tell her that homicide cops had precious few chances to see their victims alive.

Infante must have been thinking the same thing, for he said: “A few more cases like this, and we’ll be out of business.”

“A few more cases like this,” Nancy said, “and I’m going to get a job at Circuit City.”

Actually, she had never loved her job more than at that moment.

The media relations office would schedule a press conference in the morning, probably in time for the noon television shows. Nancy was already planning to sleep through it, let the corporal tell the tale. That was how they did it in Baltimore County. Detectives did the work, and the media office relayed the results. The television types would be so focused on the breaking news aspect, they probably wouldn’t dig too deep into the whys of it all. The Beacon-Light would be left to find an angle that wouldn’t be old by the next day.

That would feel good, screwing the paper and that girl who had tried to trick her.

Ronnie Fuller had taken almost two hours to walk home after running away from the flashlights in the woods. She had tried to stick to alleys and side streets, venturing out on Route 40 only when absolutely necessary. Once she arrived at the house on St. Agnes Lane, she had stood across the street, looking for signs that her parents were up and waiting for her, searching the street for a patrol car. But the house was dark, her parents out somewhere, and there was no cop car in sight. She crept up to the front door, only to jump when a small rectangle of paper floated to the ground. It had been stuck between the storm door and the frame.

“Mira Jenkins, Beacon-Light,” said the front of the card. On the back, in neat block letters, someone had written. “I really, really need to talk to you. Call me!”

Ronnie let herself in, and all but crawled up the stairs to her room. Sleep. She would sleep.

But once on her bed, sleep would not come. All she could think of was Alice, her threats, her taunts. Alice could make a person do horrible things. It would be nothing for Alice to make others believe that Ronnie had taken this child and carved her up. The newspaper knew her name, just as Alice said, they were going to tell people about her. Alice always got her way, in the end.

You be the daddy and I’ll be the mommy and this is our baby.

That was how the game had begun, and it was only a game at first. They were going to take care of the baby they had found. She lived in a big house, Alice said. Her parents would probably give them a lot of money for finding her and keeping her safe. But it might take a day or two before a reward was offered, so they had to take good care of her until then.

How much money? Ronnie had wondered.

Oh, a lot, Alice had said with confidence. Enough so I can go to St. William of York again next year.

And me, too?

No, Alice had said, looking vague. You still have to go to public school. But you might be able to buy your mother a new car.

It was on the second day that the baby had gotten sick and fussy. Alice stopped talking about the reward and started imagining the kind of life that a sick little baby would have in a big house where everything was perfect. Except for her.

No one loves her, Alice had said mournfully over and over. No one will ever love her.

Should we take her back? Ronnie had asked. Should we call someone and tell them where she is?

They’ll only leave her on the porch again, hoping someone else will take her. They don’t want her. She’s not pretty, and she cries all the time, so they want her to disappear.

It was so hot tonight, especially in Ronnie’s windowless room. Unable to sleep, she decided to run a tepid tub, something she did when she needed to cool off. She locked the bathroom door, even though no one was home. Naked, she slipped into the tub, frowning at her body. She had never liked having such big breasts, which looked silly and out of place on a skinny girl. Clarice had once asked if they were fake. Even her dad sneaked looks at them, although not in a gross way. He seemed dismayed, as if he were scared for Ronnie, as if he knew how other men acted around her.

You be the daddy and I’ll be the mommy and this is our baby.

As the daddy, Ronnie had been responsible for bringing food to the cabin and Alice had served it. The baby hadn’t liked what they gave her and she cried, and her poo turned green, and that’s how they knew she was sick. The only scarier thing than her crying was her not crying.

By the third day, she became listless and dull, probably from eating the wrong things, but Alice had insisted they could not take her back. The baby was dying, she announced. It was only a matter of time. She had been sick all along, and her parents had left her outside, hoping someone would take her off their hands. Funny, Ronnie always remembered the exact phrase: off their hands. She had never heard that before.

“You have to take care of this baby,” Alice had told Ronnie. “You have to help her. If you use a pillow and then get rid of it, no one will know. They’ll think she died in her sleep. Babies do that all the time. And this baby is going to die anyway. It’s cruel to let her suffer.”

“Can’t we take her back?”

“It’s too late,” Alice said. “They’ll think it’s our fault. But it’s not. You have to do this, Ronnie.”

She hadn’t used a pillow, though. She had brought one as Alice had instructed, the one from her bed, still in its Scooby-Doo pillowcase. But in the end, it had seemed wrong to put something so large over the small face. Instead, Ronnie had placed her hand over the baby’s mouth and turtlelike nose, counting her own breaths until the baby’s stopped. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand. This was how they had been taught to count seconds back in third grade, and Miss Timothy, a lay teacher, had told them to put their heads on the desk and raise their hands when they thought a minute had passed. Four one thousand, five one thousand, six one thousand. Ronnie had not raised her hand until she began to hear small giggles around the classroom. She had forgotten to count, and ninety seconds were gone before she realized she should fake it. Seven one thousand, eight one thousand, nine one thousand. It seemed to Ronnie that the little girl’s eyes, which had been dull and unfocused for the past two days, met hers with gratitude. She knew she was sick and unloved. She wanted to die. Ten one thousand, eleven one thousand, twelve one thousand.

When the body was still and the baby quiet, Ronnie realized the enormity of what she had done and the impossibility of taking it back. Instead of crawling into her house through the bedroom window she had been using to come and go that week, she hid beneath the honeysuckle vines in Helen’s backyard, waiting to be discovered. She knew Helen would find her somehow. And she did, drawn to the hiding place by Ronnie’s sobs. Once there, she listened to Ronnie’s story without comment or criticism, rocking her in her arms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She didn’t.

Thursday, October 8
37.

“The date is wrong.”

“Excuse me?”

“The date. It’s wrong.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I choose to remember this day.”

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

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

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

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

Perhaps the girl understood more than she let on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was nothing to say to that.

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

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

“You even called me.”

“So you said.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Aren’t most of us?”

“Not to that extent.”

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

“Are you-?” she asked.

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

“Trying?”

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

“Isn’t it hard?”

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

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

“Impossible, probably.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Am I supposed to feel guilty?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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