What The Dead Know

CHAPTER 34

The last leg of Miriam’s trip to language school was complicated by the fact that she didn’t yet speak Spanish. A true Catch-22, she thought as she stood in the cavernous, chaotic bus station, where she had managed to purchase her first-class ticket to Cuernavaca with a minimum of misunderstanding. She had gotten through customs and finessed the Mexico City cab system to get there and was feeling very proud of herself up until the moment she left the ticket counter, her bus ticket for Cuernavaca clutched in her trembling hand.

But how to find the right bus among those lined up in the lanes outside, rumbling and belching black smoke? The announcements on the PA system were nothing more than bursts of static, incomprehensible in any language. There was no information booth that she could find, no one seemed to speak English, and the halting Spanish she had acquired in her introductory course back in Texas was of little use. People stared at her blankly when she stammered out her questions, then released a torrent of words, peppering her with sounds. They wanted to help. Their faces were kind, their gestures affectionate and warm. They simply did not understand anything she said.

She studied her ticket, noted that it was blue, then began looking at the tickets in others’ hands. There was a woman whose ticket was also blue, a tired-looking woman with the kind of profile that one saw in Mayan art-the noble, hawklike nose, the flat forehead.

“ Cuernavaca?” Miriam asked.

The woman considered Miriam’s question cautiously, as if she had known a lifetime of simple questions that turned out to be sinister and dangerous.

“Sí,” she said. “Ya me voy.” She turned away, as if she thought Miriam’s question had been a subtle order to move along. When she glanced back over her shoulder and saw Miriam following her, she picked up her pace, which was difficult as she was traveling with two large shopping bags. But it was more difficult for Miriam, with her suitcase strapped to a set of rollers, and she began to fall behind. The woman glanced back again, saw Miriam struggling, then registered the ticket in her hand, that it was the same as hers.

“ Cuernavaca ,” she said, understanding. She waited for Miriam to catch up with her, then led her to the proper bus. “ Cuernavaca,” she repeated, smiling, as if Miriam were a child learning an essential word. “ Cuernavaca,” she said upon boarding, settling in a seat across the aisle. Then she dared a new bit of vocabulary, words that Miriam knew she should she know, words that she had learned at some point, but were lost to her. The woman tried again, speaking more slowly. Miriam laughed and threw up her hands, mocking her own ignorance. The woman smiled and laughed, too, seemingly relieved that she would not have to try to make conversation with this gringa stranger for the hour’s journey south. She settled back in her seat, rummaged through one of her bags, and pulled out something wrapped in waxed paper. She peeled the paper away, revealing a mango on a stick coated with a thick sprinkling of what appeared to be chili pepper. Now that she was safe on the bus, almost at her destination, Miriam was relaxed enough to find this wondrous. If she had seen it just five minutes earlier, when she was still lost, it would have struck her as disgusting.

¿De dónde es ? That was what the woman had asked. Where are you from? It was too late to answer, and even if Miriam did-what would she say? She had boarded a plane in Austin this morning. Did that make her a Texan? Or should she say Canada, the place of her birth? Since her parents had died, she had no ties there. She still thought of Baltimore as home, but the fact was she had lived there a mere fifteen years, while Texas had been her home for the last thirteen. Where was she from? The only thing she was sure of was that she was getting out of Texas just in time, racing the recession as if it were an unruly wave sweeping up a beach.

She had been lucky, not smart. She had sold her own house eighteen months earlier, before the market began its precipitous slide. At the same time, she had divested herself of some longtime investments she had inherited from her parents. But it wasn’t that she had predicted the stock market collapse in 1987 or Texas ’s real-estate woes on its heels. She had been toying with the idea of early retirement, so she had moved her money to CDs and other laughably conservative investments. And she hadn’t bought a new house because she wasn’t sure she wanted to stay in Texas. Her money would go so much further somewhere else. Lots of people didn’t want to stay in Texas just now, and these people had cried in Miriam’s office over the past few months, baffled by the concept of negative equity. “How can we owe?” one young woman had sobbed. “We bought the house, we made our payments, and now we’re selling it. So why do we owe seven thousand dollars?” Bolder sellers tried to suggest that a Realtor should not be paid if the deal yielded no profit for them. It was an ugly time.

But even if things had been booming, Miriam would have made the same decisions. Her pathologically optimistic partners thought she was crazy, taking four weeks off just as the spring season was gearing up. “How can you leave now?” they asked. “Things are bound to pick up.” They would think she was crazier still if they knew she didn’t plan to return to work ever. She was going to study Spanish in a month-long immersion course, then find a place to live. In the United States, such a dream was at least a decade away. But here in Mexico, where a dollar currently bought you sixteen hundred pesos, it could be done. Not that she was sold on Mexico. Belize was a possibility, or Costa Rica.

In the blur of preparations for the first leg of her trip, she had not focused on the date right away. There had been so much to do, so many signatures, even more than a settlement required. Traveler’s checks, the sublease agreement on her apartment, the sale of her car. (That alone should have alerted her coworkers she wasn’t returning. Who could live in Texas without a car?) But three weeks ago, when she finally made the plane reservation, the date, March 16, had stared up at her from her Filofax. She decided it was a good omen, getting out of the country before another March 29.

THE BUS WAS WINDING through a mountain pass, and Miriam noticed the tiny white crosses along the roadside. Come to think of it, weren’t buses always plunging down hills in Mexico? Such stories seemed a staple of the news. Bus accidents and mudslides and typhoons and earthquakes. On the cab ride from the airport to the bus station, she had seen abandoned buildings from the Mexico City earthquake of 1987, their fates still undecided. Most of the people she knew loved CNN, felt that it was an intellectual badge of honor to watch a cable channel with so much foreign news. Some called it the Crisis News Network, but Miriam felt that Ted Turner’s ultimate subtext was, Be Glad You’re Here. The rest of the world was shown as wild and unpredictable, prone to disaster and strife and civil war. Spend enough time with CNN and the United States seemed reassuringly stable.

At last the bus arrived in downtown Cuernavaca. Miriam had a hotel reservation and an address in her pocket, but she had one more linguistic hurdle before she could truly arrive. According to the note from the school, one must haggle for taxis, agreeing on a fare before the trip. How did one do that without being conversant in Spanish? When she got to the head of the taxi line, she offered the driver a thousand pesos, then fifteen hundred, then two thousand, but he kept refusing her. She was on the verge of getting flustered and angry when she realized that they were talking about a difference of a few cents.

The cab plunged into the congested streets, and Miriam’s eyes felt drunk from what they were trying to take in-a castle, one of Cortez’s, decorated with a Diego Rivera mural, the zócalo, thronged on a Sunday afternoon, with a group of men in some sort of indigenous dress. Eventually, her driver turned down a grimy, nondescript street. Miriam’s heart sank. She had booked a room at Las Mañanitas, shockingly expensive by Mexican standards, the equivalent of an airport Marriott back in the States. It was to be her last splurge, her final extravagance. She had assumed the cost would guarantee quality and was dismayed when the driver stopped at a nondescript building. “Here?” she asked, then remembering. “¿Aquí?”

The driver grunted, all but threw her luggage on the sidewalk, and drove away. Suddenly a heavy wooden door was flung open and a trim blond man appeared, accompanied by two locals, who wordlessly took her bags. Ushered into an anteroom, she saw that the hotel was designed to be a glorious secret. It turned a blank face to the street, but it was situated on an expansive courtyard, with rooms ringing an emerald lawn where-of all things-white peacocks strolled. She felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, exchanging the black-and-white of Kansas for the Technicolor of Munchkinland.

Oz made her think of the girls, their annual ritual of watching the televised version of the movie beneath an old quilt, which they threw over their heads at certain scary moments-the bellicose trees, the flying monkeys. Not the witch, interestingly, never the witch, although her early incarnation as Elvira Gulch unnerved them a little. But Margaret Hamilton had squandered her ability to scare them by appearing in those coffee commercials.

Miriam’s knees buckled, and she started to cry, just a little. How to explain, in any language, why she behaved this way? She had come to Mexico in hopes that she could stop explaining once and for all. She had come to Mexico to escape the phone calls, the ones where no one ever spoke. (“Dave?” she yelled into the empty air. “Who is this? Why are you calling me?” Once, just once, she had forgotten herself and said “Honey?” only to hear a sharp intake of breath.) She had come to Mexico to start over, and here she was, trapped in the same old life. Amazing, the levels of pain, the subtle variations, even after more than a decade. Miriam lived every day with a dull, chronic ache, like some permanent nerve damage she had learned to compensate for because there was no surgical fix. But no matter how careful she was, no matter how tenderly she protected these compromised joints and tendons, there were things that made the pain flare up, sudden and searing. Anything could trigger memories, even new experiences such as this, which she sought out hoping for a context in which the girls could not insert themselves. She looked at the white peacocks strutting across the lawn at a hotel in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and burst into tears for the children who would have been delighted by them.

But the beauty of a first-class hotel, the whole point of paying seventy-five dollars a night when you could be just as comfortable for thirty, is that the staff is trained in unfaltering politeness. The señora must be tired after her long day of travel, the blond man told the hovering staff-in Spanish, yet Miriam could understand his Spanish, which was not as rapid, whose words did not run pell-mell into each other. She was escorted to a sparkling room, where a maid brought her fresh-squeezed orange juice. The maid then gave her a tour of the room’s amenities. Nothing was too small, too trivial, to be explained. She indicated a rug on the floor. For your little feet. She showed her a bowl of fruit. In case you have hunger. And, at last, she placed a small pillow on the snowy white bed and urged her to lie down. For your little head, Miriam translated. For your little head.

Miriam pantomimed her desire for a glass of water, which would have to be distilled or purified, even in this shining place. She then tried to ask if it was necessary to dress for dinner, if she could wear pants, going so far as to unzip her suitcase and show the uncrushable silk trousers packed on the top. Cómo no, the maid responded. Not why not but how not, Miriam noted. Another idiom to master.

“¿Tiene sueño?” the maid then asked, and Miriam started. But she was only being asked if she was sleepy, not if she had dreams.

She surrendered to the bed and when she awoke, night had fallen and the hotel lawn was full of people having drinks and dinner. She sipped a kir royale, nibbled toasted pine nuts, and tried to shut out the language she already understood, allowing only Spanish into her head and heart. She was here to learn new words, a new way of speaking, a new way of being. She had already learned a few things today, and been reminded of others she already knew. She would now have hunger, not be it. Use the first-person pronoun only for emphasis. And, most important of all, she would swap why for how. ¿Cómo no?

CHAPTER 35

“Barb, I lost my story!”

The cry, all too familiar at this time of the afternoon, came from the usual source, a messy desk in a corner of the newsroom, a desk piled so high with papers and reports that its occupant would have been virtually invisible if it weren’t for her towering hairstyle. A tiny, formidably stylish woman, Mrs. Hennessey often lost her work on deadline, but seldom because of an actual computer crash or malfunction. Instead she had a habit of hiding her work in progress on the alternate screen or copying the entire story to a “save” key and then deleting it from the screen in front of her.

“Let me see, Mrs. Hennessey.” Barb tried to swing the computer around on the pedestal that allowed it to be shared by two reporters, but Mrs. Hennessey had cunningly blocked the lazy Susan by piling reference books around it, so she seldom had to share. Barb tapped away, checking the usual traps, but Mrs. Hennessey was right for once: She really had lost her work. When Barb found its ghostly twin in the backup system, it was just a blank template with a story header and the date it had been created, nothing more.

“Did you save as you wrote?” she asked, knowing the answer.

“Well, I tabbed at the end of every paragraph.”

“The tab key doesn’t save. You have to execute the save command, Mrs. Hennessey.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Mrs. Hennessey had been around since God was a boy, to use a localism. A thirty-five-year employee of the Fairfax Gazette, she had started in the women’s section, as it was then known, and fought her way into the news section, where she had covered the education beat for the last two decades. Her seniority was unmatched, if only because the paper’s most promising reporters seldom stayed for more than two years. She also was rumored to be a Holocaust survivor, but her thick gold bangles hid whatever tattoos she might have. She was, in short, tough as nails, but she reverted to a kittenish, helpless quality when her computer let her down. Or, more correctly, when she let the computer down, refusing to take the simplest steps to protect her work.

“If you hit ‘Function 2’ every ’graph or so, then the computer will store a copy of your file and continue to update it. You never saved this work. As far as the computer’s concerned, it doesn’t exist. It can’t save what it can’t see.”

“What do you mean, it can’t see it? It’s right there,” she said, gesturing at the screen with her be-ringed fingers. “It was right there,” she amended, given that the screen was blank. “I could see it. These machines are useless.”

Barb always felt defensive on the computer system’s behalf, flawed as she knew it to be. The Gazette, part of a small chain, had the incompatible habits of being progressive in its thinking and tight with its coffers, a combination that had brought them this dinosaur of a system, one that wasn’t intended for newspaper work. “It’s a tool, like anything else. When you used typewriters, there was no copy unless you inserted carbon paper. It’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”

The saying, one of her father’s, came out of nowhere. As usual, she felt wistful and sad and anxious all at once, as if this wisp of an echo could unravel her life.

“What did you say to me?” Mrs. Hennessey’s voice abandoned kitten and moved on to lioness. “You impertinent…” Here, she uttered some oath in German or Yiddish, Barb couldn’t be sure. “I will have you fired. I will-” She clambered out of her chair and over the piles of reports she had used to create a makeshift barrier around her desk, and raced to the editor’s corner office on her tiny, perfect heels, quivering all over, as if Barb had threatened her with violence. Even her topknot-dyed into submission and touched up every two weeks so nary a root showed in the fierce chestnut red-shook as if in fear.

Barb might have been worried, if she hadn’t witnessed the same performance at least twice a month since she’d started working in the newsroom last summer. Mrs. Hennessey raged up and down in the editor’s office, shaking her tiny fists, demanding Barb’s ouster. She huffed out of the room and, within seconds, Barb was summoned by electronic message.

“If you could just see your way to being a bit more tactful with her…” the editor, Mike Bagley, began.

“I’ll try,” Barb said. “I do try. Do you ask her to be more tactful with me? She treats me like her personal servant. Granted, the computer eats her work every now and then, but most of her problems stem from the fact that she refuses to do the most basic stuff correctly. I’m not her keeper.”

“She’s an”-he looked around as if fearful of being overheard-“an older woman. Set in her ways. We’re not going to change her at this point.”

“So that little tail wags the whole newsroom’s dog?”

Bagley, a large man with thin gingery hair that had faded with age to the color of Tang, made a face. “That conjures up quite an image. Mrs. Hennessey’s tail. My eyes! But look, Barb. Your career path has been unorthodox at best. Your people skills are less than…”

She waited, curious to hear what word he would put to it. Nonexistent? Crippled? But he didn’t even try to finish the sentence.

“We are utterly dependent on you. When the system crashes and you bring it back up, your work saves us thousands of dollars. You know that and I know that. So let Mrs. Hennessey pretend that she’s a person of consequence, as opposed to an age-discrimination suit waiting to happen. Just apologize to her.”

“Apologize? It wasn’t my fault.”

“You called her a crappy writer.”

“I…?” She laughed. “I said that it was a poor craftsman who blames his tools. It’s just an old saying. I didn’t say shit about her writing. But she is, isn’t she?” Barb mulled on this. It had not occurred to her before that she was entitled to have an opinion about the words that appeared on the screens she tended. She had been plucked out of the Classified department, a computer savant discovered in the newspaper’s equivalent of Schwab’s. She wasn’t even conscious of reading the paper, but she had been, she realized, and Mrs. Hennessey was a crappy writer.

“Just say you’re sorry, Barb. Sometimes the expedient way is the right way.”

She looked at him through her lashes, eyes glowering. Do you know what I could do to this system? Do you realize I could cripple this whole operation? In her six-month evaluation, Bagley-who had no right to supervise her, given that he had no inkling what her job involved-had written that she needed to “work on her anger.” Oh, she worked on it, all right. She banked it like a fire every night, recognizing it as her best source of energy.

“And who will apologize to me?”

He had no idea what she was talking about. “Look, I agree that Mrs. Hennessey is a handful. But she didn’t say boo to you. And she thinks that you said she’s a bad writer. It’s just easier all around if you apologize.”

“Easier for who?”

“For whom,” he corrected. What an asshole. “Okay, it’s easier for me. And I’m the boss, right? So just say you’re sorry and let me get the hell out of this hen fight.”

SHE FOUND MRS. HENNESSEY in the break room, a grimy alcove of vending machines and Formica-topped tables.

“I’m sorry,” she said stiffly

The older woman inclined her head with equal stiffness, a queen staring down her nose at a peasant. That is, she would have been staring down at Barb if she hadn’t been seated. “Thank you.”

“It was just a saying.” Barb didn’t know why she felt compelled to keep speaking. She had done what she’d been told to do. “I wasn’t implying anything about your writing.”

“I’ve been a reporter for thirty-five years,” Mrs. Hennessey said. She had a first name, Mary Rose. It appeared in her byline, but it was never used in conversation. She was always Mrs. Hennessey. “I’ve worked at this paper longer than you’ve been alive. Women like me, we made your career possible. I covered desegregation.”

“Yeah? That was a big issue-” She stopped herself, just in time. She had been on the verge of saying “That was a big issue where I grew up.” But she was Barbara Monroe, of Chicago, Illinois. She had attended a big-city high school, Mather. A big school in a big city was easier to fake than a small one, because anyone could be forgotten in a big school. But she wasn’t sure if desegregation had been a big issue in Chicago. Probably, but why risk saying anything too specific? “That was a big issue in the seventies, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was. And I covered it single-handedly.”

“Great.”

She had meant to sound sincerely impressed, but her voice betrayed her as it sometimes did, and the word came out a little sour, sarcastic.

“It was great. It was meaningful. More meaningful than tinkering with machines for a living. I’m writing the first draft of history. What are you but a mechanic?”

The would-be insult made Barb laugh. It was just so funny that this was Mrs. Hennessey’s idea of a cutting remark. But her laughter provoked the old woman even more.

“Oh, you think you’re so special, wiggling around the newsroom in your tight shirts and short skirts so the men all look at you. You think you matter.”

The editor had told her that she did matter, that she was essential. “I don’t see what my wardrobe has to do with this, Mrs. Hennessey. And I honestly think that your work was great-”

“Was? Was? Is. My work is great, you, you…guttersnipe!”

Again she wanted to laugh at the older woman’s idea of an insult. Yet this one was more effective somehow, finding a soft spot. Sex, her own sexuality, was a touchy subject for her. She didn’t flirt with the men in the newsroom, or anywhere else for that matter, and her skirts weren’t short. If anything, they were long by the standard of the day, because her frame was petite, so skirts hung lower than they were supposed to, drooping on her hips. With her towering upsweep and high heels, Mrs. Hennessey was almost as tall as she.

Which could explain, perhaps, why she felt it was fair play to pick up the older woman’s Diet Pepsi and pour it over her beautiful, quivering topknot.

THEY FIRED HER. Of course. Actually, they gave her the option of attending counseling sessions or leaving with two weeks’ severance. “No references,” Bagley added. As if she would ask for one, as if it would have any application when Barbara Monroe disappeared and another woman took her place. She took the severance.

She sneaked back in that night, using the newspaper’s research tools, crude as they were. The newspaper’s sole librarian was in her debt and had never dreamed why Barb wanted to know so much about the library, its capabilities. He’d been flattered, in fact, to show Barb all the things a well-trained librarian could do with a telephone and a list of reference desks in city libraries. Title searches, which kicked up property and court records, were also valuable, but they required time and money, neither of which she had right now, although she had sneaked a few through the newspaper’s account over the past year. Dave Bethany was still on Algonquin Lane. Miriam Bethany remained missing, as she had been for some months now. Stan Dunham was at the same address-but then, she had never really lost contact with Stan Dunham.

Finally she picked out her new name and existence, just as Stan had taught her to do. Time to start over. Again. It was a burn, not being able to use this job on her résumé, but she had decided that she wasn’t going to stay in newspapers. Once she got the formal training she needed, she would find a more lucrative home for her skills, in an industry used to paying for talent. She could do better than the Fairfax Gazette , even if they did have to push her out of the nest. Didn’t it always work that way? Even in the worst situation, she had always needed someone else to force her out, encourage her to move on. How she had cried that day at the Greyhound station, while other people smiled and nodded, thinking she was nothing more than a scared teenager who couldn’t bear to leave home.

Her research done, the last thing she did was write a little code, her going-away gift to the Gazette. The next day, when Mrs. Hennessey logged on, the whole thing crashed, taking with it every article in progress, even those that more responsible reporters had diligently backed up. By then she was already in a diner in Anacostia, waiting for Stan Dunham. He had tried to persuade her to drive farther north, but she told him that she wouldn’t cross the district line into Maryland. And to this day, whatever she wanted from Stan Dunham, she got.

CHAPTER 36

“Because she was adopted, you know?”

Dave had been waiting in line for a cinnamon twist when this one sentence managed to break free of the general hum around him, flinging itself at him like a shoe or a small stone. The comment, however, was not addressed to him but was part of a conversation between two placid middle-aged women waiting behind him in line.

“What?” he asked, as if it had been their intent to involve him in their conversation. “Who was adopted?”

“Lisa Steinberg,” said one.

“The little girl in New York who was beaten by her adoptive father? It’s great that the bastard is going to jail. But they shoulda gotten the woman, too. No real mother would have sat idly by while that was going on. No way, no how.”

They nodded, smug and content, the entire world known to them. They were doughy, pasty-faced women, anti-advertisements for the baked goods sold at Bauhof ’s. Dave was reminded of a book that Heather and Sunny had loved, Beastly Boys and Ghastly Girls, with whimsical drawings by someone of note. Addams? Gorey? Something like that, very clever line drawings. One story was about a boy who ate nothing but sweets until he melted in the sun, just a puddle of gelatinous flesh with facial features.

“How can-” he began, but Miss Wanda, attuned to his moods after all these years as neighbors, diverted his attention the way a mother might have headed off a son’s tantrum.

“Apple turnovers, today, Mr. Bethany. Still hot.”

“I shouldn’t…” he began. Dave was still at his college weight, but his own flesh was pretty doughy, too. Loose, with a slack to it that he couldn’t seem to overcome. He had stopped running a few years earlier, no longer having time for it.

“C’mon, it’s got apple in it. It’s good for you. An apple a day, like the doctor said.” And with the help of a turnover, Miss Wanda had him out of the store before he could lose his temper. A hot turnover, like a soft answer, turneth away wrath.

He had been out of sorts all morning, for the usual reasons and some news ones. His annual caller hadn’t checked in. It had been years since the guy had actually said anything, now preferring the passive harassment of a hang-up call, but the call had continued to come every March 29. Strange to mind that of all things, but it gnawed at Dave. Was the guy dead? Or had he given up, too? Even the creeps were moving on with their lives. Then Dave had called Willoughby. The detective hadn’t forgotten the date, far from it. He had offered the stoic understanding that Dave had come to expect, a wordless commiseration. No “Hey, Dave, what’s up?” No pretense of progress. Just “Hello, Dave. I’m looking at the file right now.” Willoughby looked at the file all the time, but he made a point of having it in front of him on this date.

Then Willoughby had dropped the bombshell on him.

“I’m retiring, Dave. End of this June.”

“Retiring? You’re so young. Younger than me.”

“We can go at twenty with full pension, and I’ve racked up twenty-two. My wife-Evelyn’s health has never been great. I’d like to spend some time with her before-They have these places, where you can live on your own, but then when you get sick, you stay on the premises, in your own apartment. We’re not there yet, but in five years or so…I’d like to have-what do they call it?-quality time with her.”

“Will you work at all? Freud believed work was essential to a man’s well-being. A person’s.”

“Maybe volunteer somewhere. I don’t need-Well, I have plenty of things to keep me busy.”

Probably he had been on the verge of saying: I don’t need the money. But even now, after knowing Dave for fourteen years, after speaking of things at once intimate and terrible, Willoughby had his pockets of reticence. Perhaps he was so used to being guarded about his trust-fund status around his colleagues that he couldn’t break the habit with Dave. Once, only once, he had asked Dave to a Christmas party, a pity invite. Dave had expected a raucous cop blowout. Yearned for it, in fact, for such a party would be a novelty to him. But it was more of a family and neighborhood affair-and what a family, what a neighborhood. This was the kind of gentle, assured social ease that the Pikesville families of Dave’s youth had been trying to achieve with all their noisy show and clamor, but it was impossible to imitate wealth at this level. Plaid pants, cheese puffs, gin martinis, thin-shanked women and red-faced men, all speaking quietly, no matter how much hard liquor they put away. It was the kind of event that he would have liked to describe to Miriam, if they still spoke. Miriam’s phone had been disconnected. He knew this because he had tried to call her last night.

“What will…who will…” His voice had gotten thick and he felt almost overwhelmed with panic.

“The case has already been assigned,” Willoughby said quickly. “A smart young detective. And I’ll make a point of impressing upon him that you’re to be kept in the loop. Nothing will change.”

That’s the problem , Dave thought bleakly. Nothing will change. Leads will pop up, only to evaporate like dew. Every now and then, a crazy person or a prisoner angling for special treatment will claim to have a tip, then be discredited. Nothing will change. The only difference will be that the new detective, whatever he knows, whatever’s in the case file, won’t have been with me every step of the way. It was, in some ways, more wrenching than the break with Miriam, and certainly more unexpected.

“Will we still…talk?”

“Of course. Anytime. Hell, I’ll be keeping tabs, don’t think that I won’t.”

“Okay,” he said.

“I have to be politic, of course. Can’t breathe down the new guy’s neck too much. But this case will always belong to me. It’s one of the two closest to my heart.”

“One of two?” Dave couldn’t help himself. He was shocked to hear that any other case had a claim on Willoughby ’s attention.

“The other one was solved,” Willoughby said quickly. “Long ago. That one was about…good police work, in the face of difficult odds. It doesn’t compare.”

“Yes, I can see how a case that centered on good police work wouldn’t compare to mine.”

“Dave.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just today. That today is today, that day. Fourteen years, and not even a bum lead, a wisp of a rumor, in the last two. I still don’t know how to do this, Chet.”

“This” being everything-not just his status as a perpetual victim of a crime that had never been delineated but his very existence. He had learned how to go on, because that phrase denoted a long, trudging trip to nowhere, pure inertia. Going on was easy. But he had long ago forgotten how to be. For the first time in years, he thought of his friends in the Fivefold Path, the ritual burning and meditation that he had abandoned because he could no longer pretend that he lived in any moment. In Alice ’s Wonderland, the rule was jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today. In Dave’s world, there was no today, only yesterday and tomorrow.

“No one’s equipped for what you’ve been through, Dave. Not even a police. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but-the file’s been in my house more often than not. Now, in light of my retirement…it has to go back, but it will always be in my head. You have my promise. I’ll be here for you. Not just today, not just this day. Every day for the rest of my life. Even when I retire-retire, it will be around here. I won’t go to Florida or Arizona. I’ll be here.”

The detective’s words had placated him, at least superficially. But Dave had been spoiling for a fight all the morning, and the mood didn’t dissipate. The Steinberg case had made him crazy since it hit the headlines eighteen months earlier, and last week’s sentencing had dredged up all those feelings again. Any story of child abuse or neglect by parents made Dave insane. Lisa Steinberg had been killed two weeks after the little girl in Texas, Jessica, had fallen into the well, and Dave had been angry about that, too. Where were the parents? His experience, strange to say, had made him less empathetic. He picked apart others as they had picked him apart. Adam Walsh, Etan Patz, the whole sad strange fraternity of bereavement-he wanted nothing to do with it.

WIND CHIMES SANG as he entered the store, now known simply as TBG-or, as the low-key, lowercase sign had it, tbg. When he made the switch, he thought about trying to use the entire name-tmwtbg-but even he could see that it was a mouthful. The clothing section of the store now took up as much space as the folk art. It had become the very type of store that Miriam had nagged him into trying, much more accessible. It was a raging success. He hated it.

“Hey, boss,” said Pepper, his current manager, a breezy young woman with thirteen hoops in her left earlobe and dark hair that had been razor-cut in the back yet kept long in the front, so long it fell into her eyes. She was Windexing the display cases. Pepper could not have been more proprietary about the store if it were her own, and Dave had yet to figure out what had made her so responsible at such a young age. She had a talent for deflection, a way of avoiding revelation. Dave had the same tendency, but he knew what had formed his temperament. Pepper might have known pain and heartache, but he could not imagine that this sunny, wholesome young woman-despite the hair, those thirteen hoops, she was a fresh-faced, all-American type-had anything truly tragic in her past. He’d thought about asking Willoughby to do a more thorough background check on her, claiming the pretext that he thought she might have sought employment with him because she knew someone or something connected to his girls’ disappearance. But he had never misused his daughters that way, and he didn’t want to start.

Pepper was beautiful, too, the kind of young woman noticed by the reluctant boyfriends and husbands dragged into the store. But Dave saw this only in the abstract. Whenever he met a woman, he estimated her age relative to what his daughters would be, and if she weren’t at least fifteen years older, he wanted nothing to do with her. Sunny would have turned twenty-nine this year, he thought with a pang. Therefore, he wouldn’t consider a woman of less than forty-five. Which should have been good news for the middle-aged women of Baltimore -a successful, available man who would never want a younger woman-except that Dave’s relationships never worked. It had become common to speak of one’s past as baggage, but Dave’s past was so much larger, so much more burdensome, that it could never be understood as a single object that he dragged behind him. His past was like riding a monster with a lashing tail. He clung to it reluctantly, knowing that he would be crushed by its heedless feet if he ever relinquished his grip.

It was a quiet morning, so he went over the books with Pepper, taking her deeper into the workings of tbg than any previous employee had been allowed. He reminded her of the spring craft show, asked if she would like to be his representative there. She squealed, actually squealed, and bit a knuckle in delight.

“But you’d be with me, right? I’d be scared, making those choices all alone.”

“I think you can do it. You have a great eye, Pepper. Just the way you display things, your attention to the store’s look-I swear, even when I buy a dud, you find a way to make people want it.”

“The kind of things we sell-they’re dreams, you know? Visions of what people want to be. No one needs anything we stock, even the clothes. So you have to group them to tell a story. I don’t know, I’m sure I sound crazy-”

“You make perfect sense. Before I hired you, I seldom took a day off. Now I’m capable of being away from the store for up to, oh, twenty minutes at a time.”

Dave’s workaholism was an old, familiar joke between them, and Pepper whooped with delight, a loud, raucous sound that made him wince. She did not know what day it was. She probably didn’t know that Dave Bethany had ever had two daughters, much less what happened to them. True, their images lived in a silver frame in the back room, on his desk, but Pepper never asked questions. She was not incurious, he believed, merely careful about delving too far into his past, lest he expect the same privilege in return. He really liked Pepper. He wished he could love her, or feel fatherly toward her, but that could never happen. Even if Pepper had been less reticent, he never would have allowed himself to feel paternal toward any young woman. In the past fourteen years, Dave had had lovers, women in his bed. But he never considered marrying again, and he had no desire to create daughters out of strangers. Pepper was his employee, nothing more.

OF COURSE, PEOPLE gossiped that she was more, later on. The next day, when emergency workers cut Dave down from an old elm tree behind his house, from the very branch where the tire swing had hung until the rope finally rotted away, they found a note directing them to a pile of papers on his desk, in the study where he had once chanted as the ghee burned at sunrise and sunset. No one needs the things we sell, Pepper had said, so you have to group them to tell a story. Dave hoped his groupings-his body, his papers, the balanced checkbook, the achingly neat house-would be understood. His letter might not be an official will, but its intentions were plain enough. He wanted Pepper to take over his business, while all his other assets, including those derived from the sale of the house, should be put in trust for the daughters that everyone else presumed dead, then released to certain charities in 2009.

“I feel awful,” Willoughby confided over the crackle of the international line, having found Miriam through her former colleagues at the real-estate office. “It was just that day that I-”

“Don’t feel bad, Chet. I don’t. At least, I don’t feel guilty about Dave.”

“Yes, but…” The sentence, while unfinished, still managed to be quite cruel.

“I don’t forget either,” Miriam said. “I just don’t remember in the same way. Which is to say, I don’t wake up every morning and hit myself over the head with a frying pan and wonder why I have a headache, which was Dave’s solution. The pain is there. It will always be there. It doesn’t have to be stoked, or encouraged. Dave and I chose different ways to mourn, but we both mourned equally.”

“I’ve never said otherwise, Miriam.”

“I’m in language school here. Did you know that? I’m learning a new language at the age of fifty-two.”

“I might do something like that,” he offered, but she wasn’t interested in what he was doing. At least Dave pretended to care about me, Willoughby thought.

“In Spanish there’s a whole set of verbs where what would be the object in English becomes the subject. Me falta un tenedor. Literally, ‘The fork is lacking to me,’ not ‘I need a fork.’ Se me cayó. Se me olvidó. ‘It fell from me.’ ‘It forgot itself to me.’ In Spanish it’s understood that things happen to you sometimes.”

“Miriam, I’ve never second-guessed anything you or Dave did to cope.”

“Bullshit, Chet. But you kept your opinion to yourself most of the time, and for that I love you.”

He wished those words-so flippant, so unfelt-didn’t hit him so hard. For that I love you.

“Stay in touch,” he said. “With the department, I mean. If anything should come up-”

“It won’t.”

“Stay in touch,” he repeated, pleaded, knowing all the time that she wouldn’t, not forever.

A few weeks later, the day before his official retirement, he checked the Bethany case file out one more time. When the file was returned, any reference to the girls’ biological parentage had been removed. Dave Bethany had always insisted that this part of the story was a cul-de-sac, a dead end, not unlike Algonquin Lane itself, which backed up to the more civilized edges of Leakin Park, an otherwise unruly bit of wilderness in the middle of the city. In the early days, just after the girls went missing, coarse, curious types drove slowly by the house, their rubbernecking intentions exposed when they had to turn around at the street’s end. Others had come to the store, buying small items to assuage their guilt. How those people had pained Dave, how hurt he had been. “I’m a fucking freak show,” he complained to Chet, more than once. “Take down the license plates,” Chet advised him. “Make a note of the name if they pay by check or credit card. You never know who’s driving by.” And Dave, being Dave, had done just that. Taken down license plates, recorded every hang-up phone call, shook his family’s life as if it were a snow globe, then set it back on the table and waited to see how the tableau might change. But no matter how many times he rearranged it over fourteen years, all the parts sifted back into place-with the exception of Miriam.