What The Dead Know

CHAPTER 42

The moment that Kevin Infante crossed the threshold at Nancy Porter’s holiday party, he knew there was a potential fix-up in the offing. He could spot the unlucky lady a mile away-a brunette in a bright red dress, not quite watching the door. She was pretty enough. Actually, she was exceptionally pretty, although in the style that other women found attractive-slim figure, bright eyes, abundant hair. That was the tip-off. She was Nancy ’s choice, and he had to admit that Nancy had pretty good taste. Still, he hated even passive throw-them-together-and-see-what-happens matchmaking, which seemed to imply that he couldn’t find women on his own, or that he was choosing poorly.

And so what if the latter was undeniably true? He was a big boy. Nancy should leave him to his own devices.

He scouted the room, looking for a conversation he could lose himself in, making him harder to approach. No sense trying to chat up the hostess at one of these things. Nancy was bustling back and forth between the kitchen and dining room, replenishing plates, piling more food on the buffet table. Lenhardt hadn’t posted yet, and Nancy ’s husband had never been that keen on Infante, but then, Andy Porter would have been inclined to dislike any man who spent hours alone with his wife, even in the most innocuous circumstances. Scanning, scanning, scanning, feeling the brunette getting closer, Infante’s eyes fell on a familiar face, although he needed a second to place the woman-round-faced, pleasant. Kay what’s-her-name, the social worker.

“Hello,” she said, offering her hand. “Kay Sullivan. From St. Agnes?”

“Sure, the one who-”

“Right.”

They stood awkwardly for a second. Kevin realized he would have to do better than this if he wanted even a temporary reprieve from Nancy ’s machinations.

“I didn’t realize you and Nancy were pals.”

“We became reacquainted, from the House of Ruth. She did a presentation for us on one of the county’s oldest unsolved murders, the Powers case.”

He remembered. He never forgot one of his own. A young woman, separated from her husband, a contentious custody battle. She had left work one afternoon. Neither she nor her car was ever seen again. “Oh, yeah, that one. How long has it been?”

“Almost ten years. Their daughter is in her teens now. Can you imagine? She has to know that her father was the number one suspect, even if nothing was ever proven. I didn’t remember that he was a former cop, though, before he went into private security.”

“Huh.”

Another awkward pause, as Infante wondered why Kay Sullivan had brought up that one piece of information. Was she trying to say that Baltimore cops were, by nature, felonious? All Stan Dunham had done was cover up a murder.

“Do you ever…?” Kay began.

“No.”

“You don’t even know what I was going to ask.”

“I just assumed it was about Sunny Bethany.” Kay’s face flamed, as if embarrassed. “We’re not in touch. I think old Willoughby checks in with her mother from time to time. Speaking of which-”

He swiveled his head, realizing that Willoughby should be among the party guests, too, and saw him in an argyle sweater, of all things-chatting up the brunette in the bright red dress. Willoughby had an eye for women, as Infante had learned since they started playing golf together. To his surprise-and, although he didn’t want to admit it to himself, his gratification- Willoughby seemed to prefer his company to the stuffed-shirt crowd at Elkridge. He was more police than prep, after all. He also was one of those genteel letches, the kind who liked to bask in the glow that good-looking women threw off. He doted on Nancy, had lunch with her at least once a month. He was probably trying to work the brunette toward the mistletoe, angle for a little cheek kiss. “I should go say hi.”

“Sure,” Kay said. “I understand. But if you do hear from Sunny…”

“Yes?”

“Tell her that it was nice of her, to remember to send Grace’s pants back dry-cleaned and mended. I appreciated that.”

She sounded forlorn but resigned, as if used to being abandoned in social situations. Infante speared a pierogi from the platter and dragged it through some sour cream-bless Nancy ’s Polack forebears, the girl knew how to put on a holiday spread. The events of last spring had been a job to him, but they must have been exciting to Kay Sullivan, a reprieve from a life spent…well, doing whatever hospital social workers do. Wrestling with Medicaid forms, he supposed.

“Grace?” he asked Kay. “Is that your daughter? How old is she? Is she your only kid?”

Kay brightened and began to tell him in great detail about both her daughter and son, while Infante listened and nodded, helping himself to more pierogies. What was the big deal? The brunette would keep.

“¿CÓMO SE LLAMA?” asked the man outside the gallery, and Sunny had to make a conscious effort not to stare at the hole above his mouth. Her mother had warned her about Javier, said he was a little unsettling to look at when you first met him, and Sunny had automatically assumed his deformity would rob him of speech as well. Back in Virginia, immersed in planning for this trip, she had imagined him as a mute, a Quasimodo figure who communicated in grunts and sighs.

He persisted, unperturbed by how her eyes slid away from his face, probably used to that visual evasiveness, maybe even grateful for it. She would be. “Es la hija de Señora Toe-lez, ¿verdad?”

How do you call yourself? You are the daughter of Señora Toles, true ? Although Sunny had been listening to Spanish-language tapes for weeks and was comfortable with the language in written form, she was finding that she needed to translate everything she heard, word by word, frame her answer in English, and then translate it back into Spanish, a less-than-efficient process. Her mother said it wouldn’t always be that way, if she decided to stay.

“Soy,” she began, then corrected herself. Not “I am,” but Me llamo . “I call myself.” “Me llamo Sunny.” What did Javier care about the other names and identities, what it said on her driver’s license and whether that matched her passport or her high school diploma? “Cameron Heinz” was on her driver’s license and her passport, and therefore on her itinerary as she made her way from airport to airport to taxi and, finally, to this street in San Miguel de Allende, in many ways re-creating her mother’s journey sixteen years ago, although Sunny did not know that yet. She would learn that later, on their trip to Cuernavaca. Meanwhile, back in the States, Gloria Bustamante was waiting for CamKetchBarb-SylRuthSunny to decide who she wanted to be. It was a complicated choice, made more so since Stan Dunham had died this summer, leaving behind a small estate that Gloria thought Sunny should contest, as Dunham’s indirect victim and, briefly, daughter-in-law. Could she claim that inheritance? Should she? And if she reclaimed her real name along with the residue of Stan Dunham’s savings, how long could she go without being discovered? As Sunny knew better than anyone, every computer keystroke left a trail.

Here, however, she could call herself whatever she wanted. For the next two weeks.

“Me llamo Sunny.”

Javier laughed and pointed to the sky. “¿Como el sol? Qué bonita .”

She shrugged, at a loss. Small talk was hard enough in English. She pushed into the store, engaging a gentle wind chime. The Man with the Blue Guitar had a wind chime, too, she remembered, although its sound had been deeper, chunkier.

Her mother-her mother!-was with a customer, a short, squat woman with a grating voice, who pushed and poked at the earrings on the counter as if they had displeased her in some way. “This is my daughter, Sunny,” Miriam said, but she was hemmed in by the counter and the customer’s bulk, so she could not come forward and hug Sunny as she clearly wanted to do. She does want to hug me, right? The woman inspected Sunny briefly, then returned to torturing the jewelry. The pieces seemed to tarnish at her touch, to darken and bend in her stubby fingers. Sunny wondered if she would ever stop seeing strangers this way, if she would continue to focus on others’ defects and try to figure out, as quickly as possible, whether they were inclined to help or hurt her. This one was clearly of no use.

“She must take after her father,” the woman said, and Sunny recalled the joy of pouring a Diet Pepsi over Mrs. Hennessey’s head in the Journal’s snack room. Regrets, she had a few, to put it mildly, but that wasn’t one of them. In fact, it was one of her shining moments. She should tell her mother that story, on their trip. It was one of the few anecdotes she could share, come to think of it, one that wouldn’t make either of them sad or anxious.

She was actually a little nervous about finding things to talk about with her mother, but it would turn out to be far easier than she anticipated. On the train into Mexico City the next day, they would begin by discussing Penelope Jackson, whereabouts still unknown, although she had stopped using Sunny’s credit cards after the first forty-eight hours in Seattle, thank God. By the time they changed to the bus to Cuernavaca, Miriam would summon up the nerve to ask Sunny if she thought Penelope had actually killed Tony, and Sunny would say yes, but not for the money, that Penelope had thought about claiming the annuity only after Tony was dead and been surprised to discover it ended with Tony’s death. “But she was definitely capable of killing a man. She had the meanest eyes…Mom. I was scared of her. From the moment I saw her, I knew I had to do whatever she wanted me to do.”

They would discuss Detective Willoughby, who kept dropping elaborate e-mail hints about coming to Mexico to play golf, and wondering if there were any good courses near San Miguel de Allende. Miriam said she didn’t want to encourage him, but Sunny thought she should, maybe just a little. What was the harm?

Eventually-not the next day, or even the day after, but several days later, sitting with drinks as the sun went down and the white peacocks strutted in the twilight at Las Mañanitas-Sunny would ask Miriam if she thought it was true, what Kay had said all those months ago, about how a tragedy only revealed the strengths or weaknesses in a person, in a family. Fissures, Kay had called them.

“You’re asking,” Miriam said, “if it’s your fault that your father and I broke up. Sunny, it’s never a child’s fault. If anything, your disappearance might have delayed my leaving. I’d been miserable for years.”

“But that’s the thing,” Sunny said. “When I looked back-during the years I was gone-I told myself we had a happy family, that I’d been silly to long for something different. Remember how we found all those doll dishes in the roots of the trees and under the bushes? Remember how Daddy bought two copies of Where the Wild Things Are, then broke the bindings and used them to create a border in Heather’s room, so it told the full story of Max and his journey? I thought the house on Algonquin Lane was magical, but it was a prison to you. One of us has to be wrong.”

“Not necessarily,” Miriam would reply. “By the way, I created the border in Heather’s room. But if I didn’t tell you that, would the memory be wrong, would your father have loved you any less? I think not.”

Finally, when it was dark, really and truly, when they could not quite see each other’s faces and they were alone in the garden, or felt as if they were, they would get around to the subject of Stan Dunham. “Your father would have been tempted to do the same thing,” Miriam said, “if you or Heather had done something wrong.”

“I did-” Sunny began, but her mother wasn’t having it.

“That’s what parents do, Sunny, try to rectify their children’s mistakes, protect them. Children can be happy when their parents are miserable. But a parent is never happier than her unhappiest child.”

Sunny turned that phrase over in her mind. She would have to take her mother’s word for it. If she knew anything about herself, it was that she wasn’t equipped to be a mother. She didn’t care much for children. In fact, she resented most of them, as if they had stolen her life from her, illogical as she knew that to be. She was the one who had been stealing lives, appropriating names and histories from girls who had never made it as far as first grade.

“Still, I like to think your father would never have caused anyone as much pain as Stan Dunham caused us,” Miriam said. “You say he was kind to you, and I’m grateful for that. But I can’t forgive what he did to us, even now that he’s dead.”

“Yet you forgive me.” It was the bruise she couldn’t stop fingering, the same way she’d been unable to stop picking the scab of her vaccination, which was what had made it so tender and vulnerable to helpful Heather and her flyswatter.

“Sunny, you were fifteen. There’s nothing to forgive. Of course I don’t hold you responsible. Neither would your father, if he were still alive. And no, that’s not your fault either.”

“Heather would. Hold me responsible.”

Here her mother surprised her by laughing. “She just might. Heather could hold a grudge as tightly as she held a nickel. But I think even Heather has to acknowledge that you never wished her harm.”

One of the peacocks shrieked, its voice chillingly human. Heather having her say? Sunny could never be as sure of her sister’s benediction as her mother wanted her to be.

But all these conversations would come later, as time and travel and darkness made intimacy possible. Right now they were in the gallery, still a little strange and unfamiliar to each other, and Miriam suddenly made a rude face above the oblivious head of her cranky customer, rolling her eyes and sticking out her tongue. The kind of face I make, Sunny realized, when someone screws up the system by downloading something and I have to fix it as they dither.

“Yes, she does take after her father,” her mother said. “This is her first trip to Mexico, and we’re going to Cuernavaca for Christmas, to stay at Las Mañanitas.”

“You couldn’t pay me to go to Cuernavaca,” the woman said. “And Las Mañanitas is overpriced.” She shoved away from the counter as if pushing back from a table after a heavy meal that had failed to please, and lumbered out of the store without so much as a good-bye or a thank-you.

“And to think,” Miriam said, coming around the counter to embrace Sunny, “that was on the tip of my tongue. An invitation for that absolute charmer of a woman to join us on our trip. How was your trip, Sunny? Are you tired? Do you want to go to my casita and nap, or would you like to have a meal first? What time did you get up this morning? Did it take terribly long to get here?”

Just thirty years , Sunny wanted to say. Thirty years and an oil slick on a highway.

Instead she chose something simpler, something she knew her mother could understand, a need that her mother, any mother, could meet. Like Max in Where the Wild Things Are, she had tired of the wild rumpus, sailed home, and taken off her wolf suit. She wanted to be where someone loved her best, even if she believed she had long ago forfeited her right to that unconditional devotion.

“I am hungry,” she said. “Planes don’t serve real meals anymore, not in coach, but then, I haven’t been on a plane since I went to Ottawa with you, when I was a little girl.” A flash of Heather and her in their matching dresses, Sunny smeared from their shared package of M amp; M’s, Heather impeccable and fastidious, the two of them forever the female versions of Goofus and Gallant. Hell, Heather had even known Tony was a creep, the first time she ever saw him. At eleven going on twelve, she was far wiser than her fifteen-year-old sister. “Can we go somewhere to eat?”

The two women linked arms and walked out into the bright, chaotic street, where Javier had to shout to be heard above a passing bus. Sunny couldn’t begin to make sense of the words, but based on his elaborate gestures, Javier seemed to be insisting that they looked so much alike, that they were so beautiful, the mother and daughter, together at last. He locked his own fingers, pantomiming their connectedness, and Sunny was reminded of those straw tubes one found at carnivals, the way your fingers got caught if you fought the tube too hard.

She met his gaze, no longer scared of his face now that she knew where the hole was, what was missing there. If only she could so readily show the world what was missing in her. Who would avert their eyes from her face, who would be unable to look at her straight on?

“Gracias,” she said, then remembered the most important word that anyone can hear, what had meant so much to her, even when it was false and unearned, wholly wrong. In pretending to be Heather, Sunny had managed to bring Heather back to life, complete with all her maddening confidence, and that was one thing she could never regret. Of all the people she had ever been, or ever would be, Heather Bethany was her favorite. “Gracias, Javier.”