What The Dead Know

CHAPTER 11

“The thing is,” Infante said to Lenhardt, “she doesn’t look like a Penelope.”

The sergeant bit. “What does a Penelope look like?”

“I dunno. Blond hair. Pink helmet.”

“What?” Drawing it out to two syllables.

“That old cartoon? The one where there was a car race every Saturday and they sucked you into believing that the outcome was somehow unknown? Anyway, Penelope Pit Stop was the name of the pretty one. They hardly ever let her win.”

“It’s Greek, though, right? I mean, not to take anything away from Hanna-Barbera, but I think there’s some famous story about Penelope, something to do with knitting and a dog.”

“What, like Betsy fuckin’ Ross?”

“Slightly before that. Like a few thousand years, asshole.”

Just twenty-four hours ago, when Infante was on the shit list, this conversation would have been completely different-same words, perhaps, but a much less friendly tone. Yesterday Lenhardt would have been up for the same bullshit conversation, but the insults, the digs at Infante’s intelligence, would have been serious, barbed rebukes. Today, however, Infante was a good boy. Two hours of overtime last night, at his desk bright and early, despite having stopped at the impound lot on his way in, and now at his computer, where he had pulled up Penelope Jackson’s North Carolina driver’s-license info and quickly arranged to get a copy of her photo faxed by the state police there.

Lenhardt squinted at the likeness, fuzzy from being enlarged on a photocopier. “So is it her?”

“It could be. Theoretically. The age, thirty-eight, isn’t that far off the mark, although our girl’s claiming older, which you don’t get much. Hair and eye color are consistent. Hair’s long in the photograph, cropped short in real life. The one in the hospital is definitely thinner than this.”

“Women cut their hair all the time,” Lenhardt said, his voice a little wistful, as if this fact made him sad. “And some even manage to drop a few pounds around the time they turn forty, or so I’m told.” Mrs. Lenhardt was a knockout, but a bit on the plump side.

“Still, I don’t think it’s the same face. This one here’s got a look to it. Kind of surly and cunning. The Jane Doe at St. Agnes, she’s softer. I mean, I don’t doubt she’s lying to me-”

“Of course.” Lying was assumed in their line of work.

“But I’m not sure what she’s lying about , or to what purpose. If she isn’t Heather Bethany-if she’s Penelope Jackson or someone else still-then how does she know to bring up this thirty-year-old case when she’s arrested? And how does she have the good fortune to fit the description, more or less?”

Infante pulled up another file on the computer, this one from a national database on missing children. He hadn’t known how to do this, but a quick call to his old partner, Nancy Porter, had pointed the way. Here were the two girls, Heather and Sunny, as they had been at eleven and fourteen, their last school pictures. Below the actual photos were an artist’s interpretations of how those girls might look today.

“She look like that?” Lenhardt asked, tapping the photo of Heather with his index finger-and leaving a little smear on Infante’s screen, right in the middle of the girl’s nose.

“Kinda. Maybe. Yes and no.”

“You been to a reunion, college or high school?”

“Naw. That stuff doesn’t do anything for me. And it’s all the way back on Long Island, where I got no people now.”

“I went to my thirty-year high school reunion a few years back. People age all different ways. Some, yeah, they looked like themselves, just a little older. Some just go, male and female. Like, you know, they got tired of trying. There were cheerleaders who weighed three hundred pounds, former football stars who managed the trick of going bald and developing dandruff. I mean, they bear no resemblance to the people they used to be.”

“I bet you liked that-going into the reunion with a pretty wife fifteen years younger than you.”

Lenhardt raised his eyebrows in mock surprise, as if it had never occurred to him that his wife was hot, when Infante knew the guy lived for the covetous glances thrown his way.

“But there’s a third type, female division only,” he said. “New and improved, better than they ever were. Sometimes with plastic surgery, but not always. They work out. They dye their hair. They’ve totally reinvented themselves, and they know it. That’s why they show up, so you’ll know it, too. The only way you could tell their age at all was by looking at their elbows.”

“Who looks at a woman’s elbows, you sick fuck?”

“I’m just saying it’s the one place that a woman can’t hide her age. My wife told me. She lemons hers sometimes. Cuts a lemon in half, hollows it out, fills it with olive oil and kosher salt and sits at her vanity, arms up like a little bunny.” Lenhardt demonstrated the pose. “I tell you, Kevin, it’s like going to bed with a fucking tossed salad.”

Infante laughed. Yesterday he wouldn’t have dreamed of admitting to himself how anxious it made him feel, being on the boss’s bad side. He had preferred to rage instead at the unfairness of it all. But today he was redeemed, a good detective with a damned interesting case, and he couldn’t deny the relief. If this woman was Heather Bethany, she was going to give them a sweet clearance. If she wasn’t-well, she almost certainly knew something about something.

“Here’s what struck me,” he said, flipping to the notes he had taken at the impound lot. “We have this car registered in North Carolina two years ago. Penelope Jackson is no longer at that address, and her landlord, when I tracked him down, said she wasn’t the kind of solid citizen who left a forwarding address. Said she followed whatever man she got her hooks into, picked up bartending and waitressing jobs. So she moved out almost ten months ago but didn’t update her registration or license.”

“Such wickedness,” Lenhardt said with a whistle. “How long did you live in Maryland before you got around to registering your car?”

“You can’t believe how they screw out-of-state people on title transfers,” Infante said. “But then-you’re one of those Baltimorons who thinks you’ve seen the world because you moved twenty miles out of the city. Anyway, the car’s backseat is trashed-burger wrappers, some of ’em pretty fresh, cigarette butts, although the gal in the hospital isn’t a smoker. You’d smell it on her if she were, and she’d be jumpy from nicotine withdrawal. It’s a car that looks as if it’s traveled a ways. But no suitcase. A purse, but no wallet on her when she’s picked up and no cash. It’s just garbage and the registration. How do you travel more than three hundred, four hundred miles without a credit card or a wad of cash?”

Lenhardt reached around Infante, pressing a few computer keys, toggling back and forth between Penelope Jackson of Asheville, North Carolina, and Heather Bethany of yesterday and today. “I wish we had one of those computers that movie cops had,” he said.

“Yeah-then all we’d have to do is input Penelope Jackson and her last-known address and her whole life would be open to us. I can’t wait until they get around to inventing those computers. Those and jetpacks.”

“Nothing in NCIC?”

“Nothing in NCIC. No military record. And no report that this is a stolen vehicle.”

“You know,” Lenhardt said, reading through the information on the missing children site, “there’s a lot of detail here. Enough for a true-crime junkie to bone up, as it were.”

“Yeah, I thought of that. But there’s some stuff that’s not here. Their exact address, for example, on Algonquin Lane. And the patrol who pulled her over? He said she was babbling about an old pharmacy at Windsor Mill and Forest Park. There’s no such thing now. But I called the reference room at the Pratt, and there was a Windsor Hills Pharmacy there, around the time the girls disappeared.”

“Kevin called the lie-berry? Man, you are bucking for employee of the month. So what about the case file? That’s where you’re going to find the level of detail that will make it impossible for some Internet surfer to fake you out.”

Infante just gave his boss a look, the kind of look that conveys a world of meaning, a look available only to long-married couples or coworkers who’ve shared many years in the same bureaucracy.

“Do not fucking tell me-”

“I called for it yesterday afternoon, soon as I got back from the hospital. It’s not here.”

“Gone? Gone-gone? What the fuck?”

“There’s a note where the file should be, left by the former primary-a guy who’s since made sergeant and been posted to Hunt Valley. He was pretty sheepish when I tracked him down. Admitted he took it out for his predecessor on the case and just plain forgot about it.”

“Sheepish? He should have been shitting himself. Bad enough to let the file leave the building, but to send it off with a former police and forget about it?” Lenhardt shook his head at the excess of idiocy involved. “So who has it?”

Infante glanced down at the name. “ Chester V. Willoughby IV. Know him?”

“Know of him. He retired before I started out here, but he showed up at some of the homicide reunions. You could say he was…uh, atypical.”

“Atypical?”

“Well, for one thing he’s a fucking fourth. You might meet a junior police, but you ever know a fourth? And he came from money, didn’t even have to work. When did the file go out?”

“Two years ago.”

“Let’s just hope he hasn’t died since then. It wouldn’t be the first time that some obsessed old coot took a file home and we all but had to go to probate to get it back.”

“Man, I hope I’m not never like that.”

Lenhardt had reached for the in-house directory and began thumbing through it, then punching in numbers, starting the hunt for the old cop’s home address. “Hello-yeah, I’ll hold.” He rolled his eyes. “On fuckin’ hold with my own department. And who are you kidding, Infante?”

“What?”

“There are supposed to be cases that eat at you. If there aren’t, you’re just lucky. Or stupid. This guy caught the reddest of red balls, two angelic-looking girls, vanishing at a mall on a Saturday afternoon with hundreds of people around. I wouldn’t wipe my ass with a police who didn’t carry that with him for the rest of his life.” Then, back into the phone. “Yeah? Yeah. Chester Willoughby. You got an address on him?” Lenhardt was clearly put on hold again, and he mimed an up-and-down pumping motion with his left hand until the person came back on the line. “Great. Thanks.”

He hung up, laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“In the time that took, you coulda walked over there. He’s in Edenwald, behind the Towson Town Center mall, not even a mile from here.”

“Edenwald?”

“Retirement community, one of the pricey ones where you pay extra money so you can die in your own bed. Like I said, he comes from money.”

“Do you think that rich cops work more OT or less?”

“They probably work more, but don’t put in for it. Hey, maybe you ought to pretend you’re rich sometimes, see what it’s like to work an hour out of love.”

“Not even for your baby blues.”

“What if I kiss you first?”

“I’d rather take it up the ass and get the cash.”

“Well, that makes you a faggot and a whore.”

Whistling, Infante grabbed his keys and headed out, feeling about as content as he ever did.

CHAPTER 12

“Buenos días, Señora Toles.”

Miriam fished her keys out of her battered leather bag-“distressed” is what she would say if she were trying to sell it to someone-and unlocked the door to the gallery. She loved the way “Toles” sounded in Spanish-Toe-lez, instead of the flat, ugly syllable it was meant to be, “Tolls,” a word that denoted fees and payments. No matter how long she lived in Mexico, it never got old, this aural transformation of her maiden name.

“Buenos días, Javier.”

“Hace frío, Señora Toles .” Javier rubbed his bare arms, which were goose-pimply. Such a March day would have been considered a godsend back in Baltimore, not to mention Canada, but it was frigid by San Miguel de Allende’s standards.

“Perhaps it will snow,” she said in Spanish, and Javier laughed. He was simple-minded and laughed at almost anything, but Miriam still appreciated his ready laughter. Once, before, her sense of humor had been a key part of her personality. It was rare now that she made anyone laugh, which puzzled her, because Miriam felt she remained capable of wit. In her head she amused herself constantly. Granted, it was a cruel wit, but her sensibility had always been on the cynical side, even when the cynicism was unearned.

Javier had attached himself to the gallery and Miriam shortly after she began working there. A teenager at the time, he hosed down the sidewalk in front of the shop, cleaned its windows without being asked, and told the turistas in a confidential whisper that it was el mejor, the very best of all San Miguel de Allende’s shops. The owner, Joe Fleming, considered him a mixed blessing. “With that walleye and that cleft palate, he probably scares away as many customers as he brings us,” he complained to Miriam. But she liked the young man, whose affection for her seemed rooted in something much deeper than the tips she slipped him.

“¿Ha visto nieve?” Have you seen snow, Señora Toles?

Miriam thought of her childhood in Canada, the endless winters that made her feel as if her family had been exiled from some more desirable climate. She had never gotten a satisfactory answer as to why her parents chose to leave England for Canada. Her mind skipped ahead to the blizzard of 1966 in Baltimore, a freak meteorological legend. It had fallen on Sunny’s sixth birthday, and they’d taken six little girls from her class to see The Sound of Music in a downtown theater. It had been sunny and cloudless when they entered. Two-plus hours later, the Nazis vanquished and the world safe once again for family singing troupes, the party emerged to find a city in near-whiteout conditions. How she and Dave had struggled through the streets of Baltimore, delivering each daughter to her parents-literally delivering them, carrying them so their party shoes would not be ruined, handing them to mothers and fathers standing worriedly in their doorways. They laughed about it later, but it had been terrifying at the time, the old station wagon slithering over the roads, the girls shrieking in the back. Yet Sunny and Heather later remembered it as a grand adventure. That was the miracle wrought by a happy ending. You were free to relive a terrifying story as if it were merely exciting.

“No,” she told Javier. “I’ve never seen snow.”

She told such small lies all the time. It was easier. Mexico required less lying than the places she’d lived before, because it was a place full of people trying to leave various things and people behind. She assumed all the ex-pats lied as much as she did.

Miriam had come to San Miguel de Allende for a weekend in 1989 and essentially never left. She had intended to choose a less Americanized Mexican city in which to settle-and, not incidentally, a cheaper one, where she might have been able to live on her savings and investments alone, not work at all. But within two days of alighting from the train, she couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. She had returned to Cuernavaca to collect the rest of her things, then arranged to sell her possessions in storage back in the States. When she bought her little house, her casita, she started with only a bed and her clothes. Today she didn’t have much more. That was something else, like hearing the Spanish-soft version of her name, that never got old-waking up in a bare, uncluttered space of whitewashed walls and fluttering, sheer white curtains. The furniture, what there was of it, was pine. The Saltillo floors had been left bare. The only colors in Miriam’s apartment were in her dishes and housewares, vivid blues and greens, purchased on discount from the gallery. If she decided to move again, it would take her no more than a day or two to dispose of her things. She had no intention of moving again, but she liked having the option.

The house on Algonquin Lane had been full of stuff, bursting with it. Miriam hadn’t minded at first. For one thing, so much of what they carried then had belonged to the girls. Children didn’t travel light, not even in those pre-car-seat days. They had toys and hats and mittens and dolls and stuffed animals and those hideous plastic trolls and, in Heather’s case, a blanket known as “Bud,” whose intermittent disappearances kept the household in a frenzy. Sunny, not to be outdone, had an imaginary friend, a dog named Fitz. Strangely, Fitz was as capable of getting lost as Bud. In fact, Fitz got lost whenever Bud got lost, and then some, and Fitz proved much harder to find. Sunny would stomp up and down the stairs of the house, reporting grimly on his non-whereabouts. “Not in the basement.” “Not in the bathroom.” “Not in your bed.” “Not under the sink.” For an imaginary dog, Fitz required a lot of care. Sunny began putting food down for him, refusing to understand that this was an invitation for roaches and rodents. She left the back door open, so Fitz could go outside. On rainy days Miriam came to believe that she could smell a wet dog.

The house on Algonquin Lane had baggage of its own, as it turned out. Purchased at auction, Miriam’s first taste of her talent for real estate, it had come “as is.” Miriam and Dave had understood that this meant the systems weren’t guaranteed, that it was a bit of a Let’s Make a Deal gamble. What they hadn’t realized was that the house wouldn’t be cleaned in any way. The longtime residence of an elderly woman, it had the feel of a life interrupted, as if aliens had swept in and kidnapped the people there. A cup and saucer sat on the table, a spoon at the ready for a pot of tea that was never made. A book lay on the stairs, as if to remind someone to carry it up. The old furniture was draped with antimacassars, a few askew, waiting for a gentle hand to set them straight. It reminded Miriam of a nineteenth-century version of the automated house in that Bradbury story “There Will Come Soft Rains.” The family was gone, but the house lived on.

Initially, the things left behind had seemed a bonus, a windfall. Some of the furniture was usable, and the dishes were actually valuable- Lowestoft china, too good for everyday use, nicer even than Miriam’s dinner-party china. In the backyard the girls found the remains of tea sets hidden in odd places-in the gnarled roots of the old oaks, beneath the lilac bushes, where they had rusted just a little. But these discovered treasures quickly became oppressive. They had to move as many things out as they did in. Why had so much stuff been left behind? They had been in the house for two months when a helpful neighbor volunteered that the former owner had been murdered in the kitchen by her own nephew, her only heir.

“That’s why it went to auction,” said the neighbor, Tillie Bingham. “She was dead and he was in prison, so he couldn’t inherit.”

She lowered her voice, although the girls were out of earshot and uninterested in this over-the-fence conversation. “Drugs.”

Spooked, Miriam had tried to persuade Dave to put the house back on the market, even if it meant taking a loss. They could be downtown homesteaders, she told him, knowing what would appeal to him, settling in one of the grand old town houses of Bolton Hill. This was before the era of the dollar house, before the great revival of downtown, but Miriam’s instincts about real estate were always sound. If Dave had heeded her advice, they would have had a far more valuable house in the end, for the values in their little corner of Northwest Baltimore remained flat for years.

And, of course, the girls would be alive.

That was the secret game that Miriam could never stop playing with herself, unhelpful as she knew it to be. Go back into history, change one thing. Not the day itself. That was too obvious, too easy. Their doom was sealed before that day dawned, when Sunny decided to spend the afternoon at the mall and Heather lobbied for permission to join her. But if she could go a little further back, then destiny could be thwarted. If they had put the house on Algonquin Lane up for sale as Miriam had urged, if they had never purchased it at all, then the chain of events could be disrupted. She wondered who owned it now, if the current residents knew of its talent for death. One murder in a house was bad enough, but if a buyer knew the full story of Algonquin Lane…No, not even Miriam could sell that house, and Miriam, in her heyday, could sell almost anything.

Hindsight was twenty-twenty, as the cliché would have it, but not always. After the girls had disappeared, Dave had proved to be even more myopic about their past than he had been about their present. Their problem, their curse, he insisted to neutral third parties, was that they were happy. Life was perfect, and therefore they had to fall. To hear Dave tell it, Algonquin Lane was a veritable Eden, and some unknown force had slithered through their lives and pinned its crimes on them.

The media had bought it, too. People were less cynical then, resources fewer. Today the shock of two missing sisters would have dominated national news channels, an armchair detective story for those lucky parents who knew where their children were. Back then, the girls’ disappearance had been a local story, generating only a passing mention in a Time magazine piece on missing children. More national attention might have helped achieve what Miriam was always careful to think of as a resolution, but she supposed they’d been better off without the intrusion. Nowadays it would probably take a day for an amateur blogger to uncover the nature of Miriam’s alibi, not to mention the debts that were weighing the family down. Thirty years ago the police could keep such secrets, while Equitable Trust had quietly paid off their first and second mortgages. (Children missing and presumed dead? Then you deserve a free house.)

Yet Dave’s version-spin, as it might be called now-had proved to be good for his business, not to mention her own career. Especially in that first year, Miriam could tell when it was her name, more than anything else, that had been the chief factor in attracting a new client. Midway through her spiel, while laying out what she could do for a motivated seller, how the firm could help with financing for pre-qualified buyers, she would catch one of the clients, usually the wife, inspecting her gravely. How do you go on? was the unspoken question. How do you not? was Miriam’s unstated answer. What are my choices?

She sometimes wished Dave could see her now, working in a store not unlike the one he had run. He would appreciate the irony-Miriam, who had so loathed The Man with the Blue Guitar, selling the very same Oaxacan pottery that Dave had tried to persuade middle-class Baltimore to buy long before it was ready for such wares. But she’d needed a job and, although she had little use for the gallery owner’s taste, she liked him immediately. Joe Fleming was a jolly, flamboyantly gay man-when he was talking to customers. But Miriam had known from the moment she met him that it was an act, a cover for something dark and sad. Faux Joe, she called it now. “Here come some customers,” she would call out to him. “Time to put on our faces, the ones we keep in the jars by the door.” “I’ll be right there, Miss Rigby,” Joe replied, exaggerating his Texas drawl. And although Miriam didn’t share Joe’s taste, she was superb at selling the things he stocked. Her secret was that she really didn’t give a shit. With her good posture and her marvelous figure still intact, her dark hair shot through with wiry strands of silver, she had a reserved, cool manner that whipped shoppers into a frenzy of buying, as if this might win her approval, prove their taste equal to hers.

It was quiet in the shop this morning. The snowbirds had started migrating north; the frenzy generated by Easter was still a week away. Miriam had first arrived in San Miguel de Allende in Easter Week 1989, completely by accident. Before, Easter had been a secular holiday to her, more about the baskets that she assembled so painstakingly, the elaborate egg hunts that Dave staged in the yard. Neither one of them had grown up in observant homes; Miriam was “Jewish” and Dave was “Lutheran” in the same way that she was German and he was a Scot. And while many had counseled a return to religion as a way of coping with her grief, Miriam had even less use for it after the girls disappeared. “Faith explains nothing,” she told her parents. “It simply asks you to wait for an explanation that may or may not come after you die.”

But the faith to which Miriam had been exposed was polite, demure. Even the Fivefold Path, as practiced by Dave, was restrained and low-key. In Mexico there was still something savage and outlaw about religion. She wondered if that was a consequence of the years that it had been prohibited, when Catholicism had been driven underground in the 1930s, but that theory wouldn’t come to her until she’d been there several years and immersed herself in books such as Alan Riding’s Distant Neighbors and Graham Greene’s The Lawless Roads. On the day she arrived in San Miguel, she knew only that the crowd had the panting intensity of people waiting for a rock concert, and she joined them out of base curiosity. At last the processional came into view, a startlingly lifelike mannequin of Jesus in a glass coffin, held aloft by women dressed in black and purple. Miriam had been repulsed by Jesus under glass, but liked the fact that it was women who carried him. That was Good Friday. By Easter Sunday, she had decided she wanted to live in San Miguel.

Anniversaries. There was a date, of course, a specific one-March 29, and it would be logical to mourn her daughters on that day. But it was the moving target of the Saturday that fell between Good Friday and Easter Sunday that got to Miriam. It was the day, more than the date, that mattered. It had been foolish to pretend that she was working that day. Even Dave, naïve as he was, should have been able to figure out that a real-estate saleswoman, even Baumgarten’s hard-driving number one saleswoman, didn’t have to go into work on Saturday when there were no open houses on Sunday. If only Dave hadn’t ignored all the evidence of a philandering wife, if only he had called her on what she was doing a week or two earlier. But he had probably been scared that she would leave him. To this day, she didn’t know if she would have, not if the children had lived.

Joe arrived late, the owner’s prerogative. “Texans,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder at the window, where a group of tourists were studying the displays skeptically. He hissed the word the way a cowboy might have said “Injuns” in an old-fashioned movie. “Cover me.”

“You’re a Texan,” Miriam reminded him.

“That’s why I can’t deal with them. You take them. I’ll be in the back.”

Miriam watched Joe disappear between the bright curtains that separated the gallery from a workshop in the back. With his red face and huge belly blooming beneath his oxford-cloth shirt, he looked unhealthy, but then he always had. When she met him in 1990, she assumed he had HIV, but his midsection had only grown more and more rotund, while his legs remained stick-thin and wobbly. Faux Joe the Folk Art Ho. They had enjoyed their own don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy from the beginning, maintaining their superficial bonhomie for fifteen years. Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies. Tell me no secrets and I’ll do you the same favor. Once, after a long, drunken dinner party when Joe had been spurned by a young man he’d courted for months, he seemed on the verge of confiding in Miriam, spilling all his secrets. Miriam, sensing his need, had headed off the confession by jumping ahead to the benediction he clearly needed.

“We’re such good friends we don’t need to go into specifics, Joe,” she’d said, patting his hand. “I know. I know. Something bad happened, something you seldom speak of. And you know what? You’re right to keep it inside. Everyone says just the opposite, but they’re wrong. It’s better not to speak of some things. Whatever you’ve done, whatever happened, you don’t need to justify it to me or anyone. You don’t need to justify it even to yourself. Keep it locked up.”

And the next morning, when they met at the gallery, she could tell that Joe was glad for her advice. They were best friends who told each other nothing of significance, and that’s the way it needed to be.

“Is this real silver?” one of the Texans asked, barging through the door and grabbing a bracelet from the window display. “I hear that there are a lot of fakes down here.”

“It’s easy enough to tell,” Miriam said, flipping it to show the woman the stamp that certified it as silver. But she didn’t hand the bracelet back to the woman, her own private technique. She held it as if suddenly reluctant to surrender the object, as if she had just realized she wanted it for herself. A simple trick, but it made the right kind of customer wild to own the thing in hand.

The Texans turned out to be good for a lot of jewelry, which was typical. One of the women, however, had better-than-average taste, and she gravitated toward an antique retablo of the Virgen de Guadalupe. Miriam, seeing her interest, moved in for the kill, telling the story of the beloved figure, how a cape full of rose petals burned itself into the cloak that a peasant brought to the cardinal.

“Oh, it’s darling,” the woman trilled. “Just darling. How much?”

“You sure can sling the shit,” Joe said, coming out as the quartet left, accompanied by Javier’s effusive good wishes.

“Thanks,” Miriam said, sniffing at the burst of breeze that entered the shop in the Texans’ wake. “Do you…is there a strange smell in here this morning?”

“Just the usual mustiness that we get in this chilly weather. Why, what do you think you smell?”

“I don’t know. Something like…wet dog.”

Not in the bedroom , Sunny would report. Not in the basement. Not under the lilac bush. Not on the porch. There are, of course, an infinite number of places where one is not, yet only one place where one actually is. Miriam liked to think that Fitz, at least, had found his way to the girls, and stayed with them all these years, a loyal guardian.

As for Bud, Heather’s hapless blanket, reduced to a small square-it was here in Mexico with Miriam, a faded scrap of blue cloth, preserved in a frame that she kept on her nightstand. No one ever asked her about it. If they had, she would have lied.

CHAPTER 13

Infante’s momentum, so strong all day, faltered at the driveway to Edenwald. Nursing homes-and whatever they called these places, retirement communities or assisted living, they were still nursing homes-were creepy to him. Instead of making a right into Edenwald’s parking lot, he found himself going left into the mall, toward TGI Friday’s. It was going on 1:00 P.M., and he was hungry. He had a right to be hungry at 1:00 P.M. He hadn’t been in a Friday’s for a few years, but the staff still wore those striped referee tops, which he had never quite gotten. A ref-timekeeper, custodian of the rules-didn’t convey fun to him.

The menu was also full of mixed messages, pushing plates of cheesy things and fried things, then including the breakdown of net carbs and trans fats in other items. His old partner had analyzed every bite this way, depending on which diet she was trying. By calorie, by carb, by fat, and, always, by virtue. “I’m being good,” Nancy would say. “I’m being bad.” It was the only thing he didn’t miss about pairing with her, the endless dissection of what she put in her mouth. Infante had once told Nancy that she didn’t know what bad was if she thought it was something found in a doughnut.

Thinking of which-he smiled at the waitress, not his, but one at a nearby table. It was a defensive smile, an in-case-I-know-you smile because she looked a little familiar, with that high-on-the-head ponytail. She flashed him an automatic grin but didn’t make eye contact. So she wasn’t someone he knew. Or-this had never occurred to him before-maybe she had forgotten him.

He paid his bill and decided to leave his car where it was, cutting across Fairmount Avenue to Edenwald. What was it about the air in these places? Whether super-posh, like this one, or just a step up from a county hospital, they all smelled and felt the same: overheated and cold at the same time, stuffy, room deodorizers and aerosols battling the medicinal air. Death’s waiting room. And the more they fought it, like this place with all its brightly colored flyers around the lobby-museum trip, opera trip, New York trip-the more obvious it seemed. Infante’s father had spent his last years in a nursing home on Long Island, a no-frills place that all but announced “You’re here to die, please hurry up.” There was something to be said for the honesty of its approach. But if you could afford a place like this, of course you’d ante up for it. At least it cut down on a family’s guilt.

He stopped at the front desk, where he could tell that the women were checking him out, wondering if he was going to be a regular. He inspected them back but didn’t see anything of note.

“Mr. Willoughby is home,” the receptionist said.

Of course , Infante thought. Where else would he be? What else did he have to do?

“CALL ME CHET,” said the man in the brown cardigan, which looked expensive, maybe cashmere. Infante had been gearing up to meet someone feeble and ancient, so this trim, well-dressed man was a bit of a shock. Willoughby was probably this side of seventy, not much older than Lenhardt and considerably healthier-looking. Hell, in some ways he looked healthier than Infante.

“Thanks for seeing me with no notice.”

“You got lucky,” he said. “I usually play golf over at Elkridge on Thursday afternoons, but this last gasp of winter forced us to cancel. Do I detect some New York in your voice?”

“Some. They beat most of it out of me in the twelve years I’ve lived here. Ten more years and I’ll be saying ‘warter’ and ‘zinc.’”

“Of course the so-called Bawlmer accent is a working-class accent. It hews very close to Cockney. There are families who go back four hundred years in Baltimore, and I can assure you they don’t speak that way.”

On the surface it was an asshole thing to say, a clever way of saying My family is old and rich, just in case the casual mention of Elkridge Country Club hadn’t done the trick. Infante wondered if the guy had been like that as a detective, trying to have it both ways. A cop, but a cop who never let his coworkers forget that he didn’t have to be one.

If so, he must have been hated.

Willoughby settled into an armchair, his regular seat judging by the sweat line where his close-trimmed hair ended. Infante perched on the sofa, clearly a woman’s purchase-rose-colored and uncomfortable as hell. Yet Infante had known the moment he crossed the threshold that it had been some time since a woman lived there. The apartment was neat and well kept, but there was a palpable absence. Of sound, of smells. And then there were the little things, like that grease line on the easy chair. He knew the feeling from his own place. You could always tell whether a woman was a regular on the premises.

“According to the records, you’ve got the Bethany case file. I was hoping I could pick it up.”

“I have the…” Willoughby seemed confused. Infante hoped he wasn’t edging into senility. He looked great, but maybe that’s why he had moved into Edenwald so young. But the brown eyes quickly turned shrewd. “Has there been a development?”

Infante had anticipated this question and prepared for it. “Probably not. But we’ve got a woman in St. Agnes.”

“Claiming to know something?”

“Yeah.”

“Claiming to be someone?”

Infante’s instinct was to lie. The fewer people in the loop, the better. How could he trust that this guy wouldn’t spread the news all over Edenwald, using it as a chance to relive his own glory days? Then again Willoughby had been the original primary. No matter how good the file was, he might have valuable insights.

“This doesn’t leave the room-”

“Of course.” Promised quickly, with a brisk nod.

“She says she’s the younger one.”

“Heather.”

“Right.”

“And does she say where she’s been, what she’s been up to, what happened to her sister?”

“She’s not saying much of anything anymore. She asked for a lawyer, and now they’re both stonewalling us. The thing is, when she started slinging this shit yesterday, she thought she was in a lot of trouble. She was in an accident on the Beltway-serious injuries, but probably nofault-and fled the scene. She was found walking on the shoulder of I-70, where it dead-ends into the park-and-ride.”

“That’s not even a mile from the Bethany house.” Willoughby ’s voice was a murmur, almost as if he were speaking to himself. “Is she crazy?”

“Not officially. Not in a way that gets picked up on a preliminary psych exam. But, in my unofficial opinion, she’s a fuckin’ nut job. She says she has a new identity, a new life that she wants to protect. She says she’ll give us the case, but not her current identity. I can’t help thinking there’s a lot more to it. But if I’m going to trip her up, I need to know the case forward and backward.”

“I do have the file,” Willoughby said, his manner slightly sheepish-but just slightly. “About a year ago-”

“File’s been out for two years.”

“Two years? Jesus, time changes when you’re not going to the job. I’d need a second to tell you that this was Thursday and if I didn’t play golf regularly-anyway, there was an obituary in the paper, and it got me thinking about something, and I asked for a chance to review it. I shouldn’t have held on to it-I know better-but Evelyn, my wife, took a bad turn about the same time and…Well, it wasn’t long before I had another obituary to worry about. I forgot that I had it, but I’m sure it’s in my den.”

He rose, and Infante was already calculating the dynamic of what was about to happen. Willoughby was going to insist on carrying the box, and robust and healthy as the older man looked, Infante should figure out a way to do it for him without insulting him. He had seen this with his own father, when he was still in the house in Massapequa, his insistence on trying to grab his son’s suitcase out of the trunk of the car. He followed the man to the den. But, sure enough, Willoughby hoisted the box in his arms before Infante could figure a way around it, grunting and grimacing a bit before he placed it on the Oriental rug in the living room.

“The obituary’s on top,” he said. “I’m sure of that.”

Infante opened the lid of the cardboard box and saw a clipping from the Beacon-Light: “Roy Pincharelli, 58, longtime teacher.” As it often happened with obits, the photo was from a much earlier time, perhaps even twenty years earlier. The strange vanity of the dead, Infante thought. The guy had dark eyes and hair, a dense cloud in the black-and-white photo, and he held himself as if he thought himself quite the dreamboat. On first glance he was okay. But study the photo for more than a second and the flaws revealed themselves-the weak chin, the slightly hooked nose.

“Complications from pneumonia,” Willoughby recited from memory. “That’s often a code for AIDS.”

“So he was gay? How does that track with the disappearance of the Bethany sisters?”

“As the article says, he was a longtime band teacher in the city and county school systems. In 1975 he was teaching at Rock Glen Junior High, where Sunny was one of his students. On weekends he had a part-time gig-selling organs at Jordan Kitt’s Music Store. In Security Square Mall.”

“Man, teachers and cops and their part-time jobs. We do the heavy lifting for society, and we still need OT gigs. Nothing ever changes, does it?”

Willoughby’s look was blank, uncomprehending, and Infante recalled that the man was rich, that he had never known what it was like trying to make ends meet on a police’s salary. How nice for you.

“Did you talk to him at the time?”

“Of course. And, in fact, he said he noticed Heather early that afternoon. She was in the crowd, watching him play Easter songs.”

“You said he taught Sunny. How did he know Heather?”

“The family had attended school concerts and the like. The Bethanys were very big on family solidarity. Well, Dave Bethany was big on it, to be precise. Anyway, Pincharelli said he saw Heather in the crowd that day. A man, maybe in his twenties, grabbed her arm, began to yell at her, then just as quickly walked away.”

“And he notices all this while he’s banging on his organ?”

Willoughby smiled and nodded. “Exactly. A mall on a Saturday is a busy, antic place. Why would you notice that one encounter? Unless-”

“Unless you were already fixated on the girl. But he was gay.”

“That’s my inference.” It killed Infante the way this guy talked, using two-dollar words without even a hint of irony or self-mockery. He must have been a good police beneath the bullshit, or the others would have torn him down in no time.

“So why does a gay guy care about two girls?”

“First of all, the crime wasn’t necessarily sexual in nature. That’s an obvious conclusion, but it’s not the only one. We had a case in Baltimore County, a few years before the Bethany girls, where a man flipped and killed a young girl because something in her manner reminded him of his mother, whom he loathed. That said, I’ve often wondered if Heather saw something that day, something that she didn’t realize she saw, but which terrified the teacher. If he was gay, he most certainly was closeted at the time and probably feared losing his job if discovered.”

“So how do both girls end up missing?”

Willoughby sighed. “It always comes back to that. Why two? How do you even get two? But if it was the teacher and he grabbed Heather first and stashed her somewhere-the back of his van, for example-and then found Sunny, he would have had a huge advantage. He was her teacher, someone she knew and trusted. If he told her to come with him, she would have done it automatically.”

“Did you ever break him down, get him to change his story?”

“No. He was consistent, albeit in the way that liars are consistent. Maybe he was getting a blow job in the mall bathroom that afternoon from some teenage boy and feared that getting out. At any rate, he never changed his story, and now he’s dead.”

“I’m assuming you checked out the parents?”

“Parents, neighbors, friends. You’ll find it all in there. And there were extortion calls, too, claims from people who said they had the girls. Nothing ever checked out. It was almost enough to make you believe in the supernatural or alien abductions.”

“Given that you read the obituaries so closely-”

“You will, too, one day.” Willoughby had a way of smiling, a kind of double-edged superiority. Irritating as hell. “Sooner than you think.”

“I guess you know whether the parents are alive? I didn’t get any hits on them.”

“Dave passed away the year I retired, 1989. Miriam moved to Texas, then Mexico. She sent me Christmas cards for a while…”

He got up and went to a highly polished piece of furniture that Infante thought of as a ladies’ desk, because it was small and impractical, with dozens of little drawers and a tiny, slanted writing surface that couldn’t even hold a computer. The old cop may have needed reminding that he had the Bethany file, but he knew exactly where that Christmas card was. Jesus, Infante thought, I don’t care what Lenhardt says. I hope I never have a case like this.

Then he remembered that he did, that he was sitting with a cardboard legacy at his feet. He saw himself thirty years in the future, passing the box along to another detective, telling the story of the Jane Doe and how she’d hoaxed them for a couple of days, then turned out to be a fake. Once you got inside something like the Bethany case, did you ever really get out?

“The envelope’s long gone, so if there was a return address, I couldn’t tell you what it was. But I remember the town-San Miguel de Allende. See? She mentions it here.”

Infante inspected the card, a lacy green cutout of a dove overlaid on a heavy piece of vellum. Inside, FELIZ NAVIDAD had been printed in red ink, and a few lines had been scrawled beneath it. Hope this finds you well. San Miguel de Allende seems to be my home now, for better or worse.

“When was this?”

“At least five years ago.”

Infante jumped on the date. “The twenty-fifth year of their disappearance.”

“In Miriam’s case that was probably subconscious. She was very intent on pushing the memories down, trying to move on. Dave was the exact opposite. Every day he lived was a conscious tribute to those girls.”

“And that’s when she moved, after he died?”

“When-Oh, no. My mistake. Speaking from what my wife called ‘deep context,’ as if everything known to me is known to you. Even more unforgivable, when one has been hoarding the context. Miriam and Dave separated a little more than a year after the girls disappeared, and she went back to using her maiden name, Toles. It wasn’t a happy marriage, even before. I liked Dave. In fact, I considered him a friend. But he didn’t appreciate what he had in Miriam.”

Infante fingered the card, studying the older man’s face. But you did, didn’t you? It wasn’t just the sense of a job undone that had led Willoughby to file this card in a place he remembered so readily. Infante wondered what the mother looked like, if she was a sunny little blonde like the daughters. A certain kind of police-a guy like this Willoughby -he’d be a sucker for a good-looking woman in distress.

“I’m assuming the medical records are in here?”

“Such as they are.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Dave had some, um, interesting ideas about doctors. Less was more, in his opinion. No tonsillectomies for his daughters, and as I understand it, he was ahead of his time on that. But also no X-rays, because he believed that even small doses of radiation were dangerous.”

“You mean-” Fuck me.

“Right. The dental records include exactly one set of X-rays, taken when Sunny was nine and Heather was six. And that’s it.”

No adult dental records, no blood information on record, not even type. Infante didn’t have the tools he would have expected to have in 1975, much less 2005.

“Any advice?” he asked, putting the lid back on the box.

“If your Jane Doe’s story doesn’t fall apart in the face of the information in the file, then find Miriam and bring her back. I’d put everything on her maternal instincts.”

Yeah, and you’d probably like to get a look at your old crush, you being a widower and all.

“Anything else?”

Willoughby shook his head. “No, I have to-If you knew what I felt, just looking at that box. It isn’t healthy. It’s all I can do to let you walk out of here with it, not to beg to come along to the hospital with you and interrogate the woman. I know so much about these girls, about their lives, especially that last day. In some ways, I’m surer of the facts of their lives than I am of my own. Maybe I know them too well. Wouldn’t it be something if a pair of fresh eyes saw something that had been staring me in the face all those years ago?”

“Look, I’ll keep you in the loop. If you like. Up or down, I’ll call you, tell you how it turns out.”

“Okay,” he said in a tone that suggested he wasn’t at all sure that was okay, and Infante felt as if he were pressing a drink on a guy who swore he needed to quit but could never quite manage it. He probably should leave the guy be, if possible. He thought he would have been more intrigued, having the old case resurface. But Willoughby looked out the window, studying the sky, seemingly more interested in the weather than the long-gone Bethany girls.

CHAPTER 14

“Heather…”

“Yes, Kay?”

Heather’s face filled with light at the sound of her name. Just hearing it was a homecoming, a reunion. Why had it been denied to her for so long? Where could she have been, what could have happened to her that she didn’t, couldn’t, reclaim her identity years ago?

“I hate to do this, but there’s so much that has to be straightened out. A discharge plan, insurance-”

“I do have insurance. I do. The hospital will be paid. But I just can’t tell you yet the account, the ID number.”

“Sure, I understand.” Kay paused, thinking about what she’d said, something she said every day, a phrase others used all the time. It was automatic. It was also seldom true. “Actually, I don’t understand, Heather.” That little beam of resurrection again. “Whatever happened, you’re clearly the victim here. Are you frightened? Are you trying to hide from someone? Perhaps you’d like to speak to someone on the psychiatric staff, someone with experience in post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“I talked to someone.” Heather made a face. “Strange little man.”

Kay couldn’t disagree with that assessment of Schumeier. “He administered a basic psych exam. But if you’d like to explore other…issues, I could arrange that.”

Heather’s smile was mirthless, mocking. “You speak sometimes as if you ran the hospital, as if the doctors did what you told them to do.”

“No, not exactly, it’s just that I’ve been here so long, almost twenty years, and worked in so many departments…” Kay was stammering as if she’d been caught in a lie, or at least in the very act of self-aggrandizement that Heather was suggesting. The initial psych report had indicated that Heather was sane by clinical definition, but not particularly empathetic or interested in people. Yet she noticed things, Kay was beginning to realize, picked up subtle details quickly. Strange little man. That was Schumeier in a nutshell. You speak sometimes as if you ran the hospital. She noticed things and used them against people.

Gloria Bustamante sailed in, the usual physical wreck, but her eyes bright and focused.

“What are we talking about?” she asked, settling in the room’s only chair. Her voice was brisk and not a little acidic.

“Discharge,” Kay said.

“Kay,” Heather said.

“An interesting topic,” Gloria said. “Discharge, I mean. Not Kay. Although Kay is fascinating in her own right.” Was her smile faintly lascivious? Had she misunderstood Kay’s solicitation of this favor? Did anyone really know what Gloria’s sexual orientation was, or were the rumors about her as groundless as the things said about Kay behind her back?

“I hit my head,” Heather said. Petulant now, her pouting-child act. “I fractured a bone in my forearm. Why can’t I stay in the hospital?”

Gloria shook her head. “Sweetie, you could have your head amputated and they’d be trying to get you out of this costly little bed, which they bill at the same rate as a suite at the Ritz-Carlton. And given that you won’t tell us your insurance carrier, the hospital is all the more desperate to get rid of you, lest they be stuck with the bill.”

“Indigent patients mean higher board costs for all,” Kay said, registering her own priggish tone. “It really is a waste of a bed. Under normal circumstances a patient such as Heather might have been kept overnight for observation, because of the head injury. But there’s no medical reason for her to remain here, and the issue needs to be resolved.”

“Everyone’s clock is ticking,” Gloria said. “The hospital’s, mine. The only person not worried about billing right now is Detective Kevin Infante. He told me this morning that if Heather declines to go before a grand jury, she could be held on the hit-and-run. The best I can do is push for home detention.”

Heather jerked up in bed, wincing in pain as she did so. “Where-not jail, not police custody. I’d die. I’d absolutely die.”

“Not to worry,” Gloria assured her. “I pointed out to the police that it would be disastrous, publicity-wise, to lock up the missing Bethany sister.”

“But I don’t want any publicity, so how can you use this as leverage?”

“I know that. You know that.” A sideways glance at Kay. “And now she knows that, for better or worse. I’m going to trust you not to run and tattle, Kay. I came here as a favor to you, so you owe me that much.”

“I would never-”

Gloria plowed on, indifferent to what Kay had to say. It would be interesting to know what a psych exam on Gloria Bustamante might reveal.

“The boy is not that badly injured, as it turns out. It looked awful, apparently, and they were worried about a spinal injury, but he’s been moved from Shock Trauma to ICU already.”

“The boy?” Heather asked, brow furrowed.

“In the SUV that tipped over after you sideswiped it.”

“But I saw a girl-I was so sure that I saw a girl, a girl in rabbit-fur earmuffs…”

“There was no girl in the car,” Gloria said. “It was a little boy who was taken to Shock Trauma.”

Heather sat up straighter in bed. “And I didn’t sideswipe anyone. The driver of the SUV hit me, and he overreacted. It’s not my fault.”

“That’s an easier case to make,” Gloria said dryly, “when you don’t flee the scene and leave your damaged car on the roadside. But we’re going to chalk that up to the head injury, try the Halle Berry defense.”

“Who?” Kay asked, and the other two women regarded her as if she were genuinely freakish.

Gloria perched on a corner of Heather’s bed. “The more pressing problem is that the police continue to insist that you’re required to provide the name and address under which your driver’s license was issued. Without those, you can be jailed in connection with the accident. So far, I’ve managed to persuade them that your potential as a material witness trumps your role as a defendant in a highway collision that was really no one’s fault. But they’re getting restless. We need to throw them a few facts to satiate them. How long has it been since you were Heather, Heather?”

She closed her eyes. Her skin was so fair and the lids so thin that it appeared as if she were wearing blue-pink eye shadow, lightly applied.

“Heather disappeared thirty years ago. The last time I changed names-it’s been sixteen years. My longest stretch yet. I’ve been this me longer than I’ve been any other me.”

“Penelope Jackson?” Kay asked, knowing of the name the patrol cop had used when Heather was admitted Tuesday night.

“No,” Heather said sharply, eyes flying open. “I am not Penelope Jackson. I don’t even know Penelope Jackson.”

“Then how-”

Gloria held up a hand to stave off Kay’s questions, and it was impossible not to notice how ragged her manicure was, how dull her diamond rings were. A piece of jewelry must be very dirty indeed if Kay’s eyes registered it as dull.

“Kay, I trust you, I do. And I need your help. But you have to respect boundaries. There are some things that must remain, for now, between Heather and me. If-always if, understand that I am speaking speculatively for now-Heather obtained her current identity illegally, then I’m going to argue she’s entitled to protect that information under the Fifth Amendment-no self-incrimination. She’s trying to protect her life and I’m trying to protect her rights.”

“Fine. But it’s harder to help if I don’t have sufficient information.”

Gloria smiled, not buying it. “I don’t need a second chair, Kay. I need someone who can guarantee housing for Heather while this is being straightened out. Housing and, perhaps, public assistance, short term.”

Kay did not bother to ask why Gloria couldn’t lend her client money or take her into her home. Such things would have been anathema to the attorney, who had already violated her own standards by taking a case without a big fat retainer up front.

“Gloria, you are so out of the loop. There hasn’t been financial assistance for single adults in Maryland since…shit, the early 1990s. And to qualify for anything, you need papers. Birth certificate, Social Security.”

“What about a victims’ assistance network? Isn’t there some advocacy group we could plug Heather into?”

“They specialize in emotional support, not financial.”

“This is what the police are counting on,” Gloria said. “Heather Bethany has no money, nowhere to go-except jail. In order to prevent that, she has to reveal where she’s been living, what she’s been doing. But Heather doesn’t want to do that.”

Heather shook her head. “At this point the life I’ve made for myself is all I have.”

“You have to see,” Kay said, “how impossible that will be.”

“Why?” A child’s question, asked in a child’s tone.

Gloria answered. “The Bethany case is the kind of thing that attracts a lot of attention.”

“But I’ve already told you that I don’t want to be that girl.”

Foolishly, Kay couldn’t help thinking of the old television show, Marlo Thomas with her enormous eyes and shiny bangs, a small-town girl breezing through the big city. Now there was a name she knew.

“You don’t want to be who you are?” Gloria asked.

“I don’t want to go back to the life I managed to make for myself and have everyone treat me like some freak, the girl of the moment-the runaway bride, the Central Park jogger, whoever. Look, it took a lot for me to get to a place of even seminormalcy. I was taken from my parents when I was a kid. I saw…things. I didn’t finish college, I drifted through a lot of jobs before I found one that suits me, allows me to have the kind of life that everyone takes for granted.”

“Heather, not to be crass, but there will be financial opportunities for you, if you choose to pursue them. Your story is a commodity.” Gloria’s smile was wry. “At least I assume it is. I’ve taken it on faith that you are who you say you are.”

“I am. Ask me anything about my family. Dave Bethany, son of Felicia Bethany, abandoned by her husband early in the marriage. She worked as a waitress at the old Pimlico Restaurant, and she preferred to be called ‘Bop-Bop’ instead of anything grandmotherly. She retired to Florida, to the Orlando area. We visited her every year, but we never went to Disney World because my father didn’t approve of it. My dad was born in 1934 and died, I think, in 1989. At least, that’s when his phone was cut off.” She rushed on, as if fearful of letting anyone else speak or ask questions. “Of course I kept tabs. My mother, Miriam, must have died, too, because there’s no trace of her. Maybe that has something to do with her being Canadian. At any rate, there’s no record of her, not anywhere I checked, so I assumed she was dead.”

“Your mother was Canadian?” Kay echoed back stupidly, even as Gloria said, “But your mother is alive, Heather. At least that’s what the detective thinks. She was living in Mexico five years ago, and they’re trying to track her now.”

“My mother’s…alive?” The collision of emotions in Heather’s face was strangely beautiful, like one of those thunder bursts in the middle of a sunny summer day, the kind that made old women nod and say: The devil must be beating his wife. Kay had never seen grief and joy in such extremes, trying to coexist in the same place. The joy she could understand. Here was Heather Bethany, thinking herself an orphan, with nothing to claim but a name and tabloid tale. Yet her mother was alive. She was not alone.

But there was anger, too, the skepticism of someone who trusted no one.

“Are you sure?” Heather demanded. “You say she was in Mexico five years ago, but are you sure she’s alive now?”

“The original detective seemed to think so, but it’s true, they haven’t found her yet.”

“And if they do find her…”

“They’ll probably bring her here.” Gloria made a point of capturing Heather’s eyes in hers, holding the look. It was a snake charmer’s gaze, if one could imagine a mildly exasperated snake charmer in a rumpled knit suit. “Once she’s here, Heather, they’ll want to do DNA tests. You understand, you get where this is going?”

“I’m not lying.” Her voice was dull and listless, as if to suggest that lying was simply too much effort. “When will she get here?”

“It all depends on when they find her and what they tell her when they do.” Gloria turned to Kay. “Can’t the hospital keep Heather until, say, her mother arrives? I’m sure she’ll be happy to put her up.”

“It’s impossible, Gloria. She has to leave today. The administration is very clear on that.”

“You’re playing into the police’s hands, giving them the leverage they want to rush this thing through, force Heather on to their timetable. If she’s discharged without a plan, they’re going to put her in jail-”

Heather moaned, an unearthly, inhuman sound.

“What about House of Ruth? Can’t she go there?”

“It’s a battered-women’s shelter, and you know as well as I do that it’s full up.”

“I was abused,” Heather said. “Doesn’t that count for something?”

“You’re talking about thirty years ago, right?” Kay felt that rush of unbecoming prurience, the desire to know exactly what had happened to this woman. “I hardly think-”

“Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay.” Even as her words seemed to promise agreement, Heather swung her head vehemently side to side, so her blond curls, short as they were, bounced and shook. “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you, and you’ll know why I can’t go to jail, why I can’t trust these people not to hurt me.”

“Not in front of Kay,” Gloria commanded, but Heather was wound up now, impossible to stop. She doesn’t know I’m here, Kay thought. Or she knows but doesn’t care. Was it trust or indifference, a vote of confidence or a reminder that Kay was of no significance to her?

“It was a policeman, okay? A policeman came to me and said something had happened to my sister and I needed to come quick. And I went, and that was how he got both of us. First her, then me. He locked us in the back of the van and took us.”

“A man pretending to be a cop,” Gloria clarified.

“Not pretending. A real police officer, from right here in Baltimore, from the county, with a badge and everything. Although he wasn’t wearing a uniform-but policemen didn’t always wear uniforms. Michael Douglas and Karl Malden-The Streets of San Francisco-they didn’t wear uniforms. He was a policeman, and he said everything would be all right, and I believed him. That’s the only real mistake I ever made, believing that man, and it ruined my life.”

With that final word, life, some long-held emotion was released and Heather began crying with such raw force that Gloria reared back from her, unsure of what to do. What could Kay do, what would any feeling person do, but reach around Gloria and try to comfort Heather, remembering to be especially gentle, given the temporary splint on the left forearm, the general all-over soreness left by a car accident.

“We’ll work something out,” she said. “We’ll find a place for you. I know someone-a family in my neighborhood, away for spring break. At the very least, you can stay there for a few days.”

“No police,” Heather choked out. “No jail.”

“Of course not,” Kay said, catching Gloria’s eyes to see if she approved of Kay’s solution. But Gloria was smiling, smug and triumphant.

“Now this,” the attorney said, her tongue darting over her lower lip, as close to a literal smacking as Kay had ever seen, “this gives us leverage.”

CHAPTER 15

One more night. One more night. Everyone had said she couldn’t stay in the hospital beyond today, but she’d gotten one more night out of them, which just proved what she had always believed: Everybody lied, all the time. One more night. There had been a hideous pop song with that title, years ago, a spurned lover begging for a final bout of lovemaking. It was a frequent motif in pop music, come to think of it. Touch me in the morning. I can’t make you love me if you don’t . She had never understood this. When she was younger, still trying to date-and, big surprise, failing miserably time and time again-the men usually ended up leaving her a few months in, almost as if they could smell the rottenness coming off her, as if they had found her secret sell-by date and realized how ruined she was. At any rate, when a man broke off with her, the last thing she wanted from him was one more night. Sometimes she threw things, and sometimes she cried. Sometimes she laughed, relieved. But she never resorted to begging for one more night, a touch in the morning, a pity fuck however you sliced or diced it. You took your pride where you could find it.

She eased herself out of the bed, everything aching, her body already sensing that the left arm was not to be counted on, not for a while, that the right arm had to pick up the slack. Amazing how quickly the body adjusted, much faster than the mind. Her mind was far from reliable these days. Did I see a boy and think he was a girl, or was there never a face at the window at all? She went to the window, pulled aside the curtain, and studied the landscape-the parking lot, the smudge of city skyline in the distance, the clogged lanes of I-95 at rush hour. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! A line of poetry stuck in her head, a legacy of the nuns, who believed you could memorize your way to intelligence. The highway was near, not even a mile away. Could she get there, put out her thumb and hitch a ride home? No, she’d be a fugitive twice over then. She had to tough this out. But how?

It wasn’t the lies that worried her. She could keep track of the lies. It was the bits of truths that put her at risk. A good liar survives by using as little truth as possible, because the truth trips you up far more often. Back when she’d been in the habit of changing names, she had learned to create each new identity fresh, to carry nothing forward. But the threat of jail this afternoon, just like the possibility of arrest that first night, had freaked her out. She had to say something. It had seemed pretty inspired, telling them about the cop, throwing Karl Malden into the mix. Odd, tangential details like that made everything else sound authentic. But they weren’t going to settle for Karl Malden. They were clamoring for a real name, and she was going to have to give them something, someone.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to the night sky.

She wasn’t sure who worried her more, the dead or the living, who posed the most risk. But at least you could bluff the living. You couldn’t put anything over on the dead.