What The Dead Know

Agnihotra mantras are to be uttered in their original form in Sanskrit.

They are not to be translated into any other language…

Agnihotra mantras are to be uttered in rhythmically balanced tone so the sound vibrates throughout the entire household. The tone should not be too loud or too weak nor should it be done in a hurry… The feeling of total surrender is developed through the utterance of these mantras.

– Adapted from instructions on how to perform the Agnihotra, the sunrise/sunset ritual central to the practice of the Fivefold Path

CHAPTER 16

Sunset fast approaching, Dave grabbed the ghee from the refrigerator and headed into the study, leaving Chet at the kitchen table with Miriam and their mugs of tea. They weren’t even trying to speak, just sipping herbal tea and staring off into space. Everyone was exhausted and hoarse after the full day of interviews, although Dave had done most of the talking. Miriam deferred to Dave, and the detective seldom spoke at all. Sometimes Dave found Willoughby ’s silence comforting. Men of action should be laconic. Other times he suspected that these still waters didn’t run particularly deep. But Chet was familiar to them now, like a dignified stray they had adopted after years of saying they didn’t want the bother of a dog.

In his study he sat cross-legged on his rug, not a proper prayer rug-other than the copper pot for the offering, the Agnihotra did not require ritual objects, which was a large part of its charm-but a dhurrie he’d found in an Indian market years ago, when he was traveling after college. His mother had still lived in Baltimore then, and he’d shipped his treasures to her apartment, despite her complaints and suspicions. “What’s in these boxes?” she had berated him upon his homecoming. “Drugs? If the police come to my door, I am not lying for you.”

He put a dung cake in the pot, adding a piece of ghee-soaked camphor, followed by the rest of the dung and the rice grains, checking his watch to see if the exact moment of sunset had arrived.

“Agnaye Svaha,” he said, offering the first part of the ghee-smeared rice grains. “Agnaye Idam Na Mama.”

People often assumed that the Fivefold Path was another souvenir from his travels, but Dave was married to Miriam and working for the state when he first heard about it, at a party in Northwest Baltimore. The Fivefold Path turned out to be the nexus for most of the people at the party, held at a beautiful Victorian in Old Sudbrook. Dave had not known such houses existed when he was growing up in Pikesville, much less such people, yet Herb and Estelle Turner lived less than two miles from his mother’s former apartment. The Turners were at once warm and reserved, and Dave assumed that their grave dignity derived from the Fivefold Path. It would be some time before he knew about their troubles with their daughter, or Estelle’s fragile health. And although Miriam had always been skeptical of the couple, claiming they’d been fishing for converts that night, they only brought up the Fivefold Path when Dave asked about the house’s sweet, smoky smell, so unexpected on a warm spring night. He had suspected, hoped for, grass, which he and Miriam were anxious to try. But the fragrance was from the sunrise/sunset ritual of the Agnihotra, and it was almost as if it had baked its way into the bones of the house. As Estelle Turner explained the smell, and its connection to the Fivefold Path, Dave saw it as a way to be the Turners-gracious, poised, living in a beautiful yet unostentatious house.

For her part, Miriam said the Agnihotra made the house smell like shit, literally. Once they moved to Algonquin Lane, she had been adamant that Dave confine the practice to his study, with the doors closed. Even then she had despaired at the greasy residue the ghee left on the walls, a filmy sheen that resisted any and all cleaning methods. Now, Dave suspected, he could set up the ’Hotra on the dining room table and Miriam wouldn’t make a peep. She never reproached him anymore. He almost missed it. Almost.

Still your mind , he urged himself. Focus on your mantra. There was no point to the practice if he couldn’t lose himself in it.

“Prajapataye Svaha,” he said, making the second offering. “Prajapataye Idam Na Mama.”

Now he must meditate until the fire was out.

THE REPORTERS HAD come in threes-three newspapers, three television stations, three radio stations, three wire services. In each group there had been one reporter who pushed for an exclusive, a private chat with Dave and Miriam, but those young comers professed to understand when Chet told them that the Bethanys preferred to tell the story only so many times, once to each medium. The reporters were uniformly polite and kind, wiping their feet on the welcome mat, expressing admiration for the remodeled farmhouse, not that any work had been done in the past year. Their voices were gentle, their questions circumspect. One young woman, from Channel 13, teared up prettily while looking at the girls’ photos. These were not the school photos, the head shots against the sky-blue background. The television types explained to Dave and Miriam that these photos had been shown so many times that they had “lost their impact,” and it would be helpful to use new ones. They chose candid snapshots that Dave kept in his study, souvenirs of a trip to the Enchanted Forest on Route 40. Heather was sitting on a toadstool, cross-legged, while Sunny stood with arms akimbo, trying to pretend she wasn’t having a good time. But it had been a wonderful day, as Dave remembered it, with Sunny’s adolescent moodiness barely in evidence, everyone tender and sweet with each other.

The newspaper reporters, the last to troop through that day, had no qualms about using the school photos that had been circulating since the girls disappeared. Yet they insisted on a new photo of Dave and Miriam, sitting with the framed school photos on the coffee table in front of them. How Dave dreaded seeing that tableau in tomorrow’s newspaper-the awkward lie of his arm across Miriam’s shoulders, the distance between their bodies, their faces turned away from each other.

“I know that there was one ransom demand, in the first week,” said the reporter for the Beacon, the morning newspaper. “And it turned out to be a hoax. Have there been any similar dead ends over the past year?”

“I don’t know-” Dave looked to Miriam, but she would not speak unless pressed directly.

“I wouldn’t expect you to tell me anything that could hurt the investigation.”

“There were other calls. Not ransom demands. More like…taunts. Obscene phone calls, although not in the traditional sense.” He stroked his chin, where he was growing a beard, or trying to, and glanced at Chet, who was frowning. “You know, maybe you shouldn’t put that in? The police determined it was just some sick kid. He didn’t know us, or the girls. It didn’t mean anything.”

“Of course,” the Beacon reporter said, nodding in robust sympathy. Forty or so, he had been a war correspondent in Vietnam and spent time in the Beacon’s foreign bureaus- London, Tokyo, São Paulo. He had arrived first and managed to convey this information about himself in the flurry of introductions at the beginning. His credentials were supposed to be a comfort, Dave supposed, an assurance that the assignment had been given to an accomplished professional. But Dave couldn’t help feeling that the man was trying to console himself, too. Two missing girls were not on a par with wars and foreign policy. He looked liked a drinker, his nose sprouting with broken blood vessels, his cheeks an unhealthy red.

“The one ransom demand-the one down at War Memorial Plaza -did they ever figure out who called that in?” This was the Light reporter, tiny and feisty. With her short pixie cut and miniskirt, she looked to be barely out of college. A jogger, Dave thought, eyeing the hard calves pressed into the lower rung of her straight-backed chair. He had started running after the first of the year, although it wasn’t the result of a New Year’s resolution. Like someone summoned by unseen voices, he had gotten up one day, put on sneakers and headed to Leakin Park, circling the tennis courts and the miniature train track. He had run to Crimea, the summer mansion built by the family that founded the B amp; O Railroad, passing the old church that his girls had believed was haunted. He was up to five miles a day now, but he had liked jogging better in the beginning, when it was hard and he had to focus on every rasping breath. Now that he reached the so-called runner’s high within minutes, his mind was free to roam again, and it always ended up in the same place.

“No…I…no-Look, there’s nothing new. I’m sorry. It’s been a year, and there’s nothing new. I’m sorry. We’re talking to you because we’re hopeful that your articles might prompt someone’s memory, might reach that one person who knows something… I’m sorry.”

Miriam shot him a look that only a spouse could interpret: Stop apologizing. His eyes replied, I’ll stop when you start .

The reporters didn’t seem to notice. Did they know? Had Chet told them-off the record, of course-all the family’s secrets, then persuaded them that they were irrelevant to the girls’ disappearance? Dave almost wished now that the whole story had come out. On his best days, he knew it wasn’t Miriam’s fault. Wherever Miriam had been that day-at an open house, here on Algonquin Lane, in a motel, in a motel, in a fucking motel-she couldn’t have saved the girls. Besides, he’d been in a bar for much of the afternoon, although he had managed to pull himself together and arrive at the mall to fetch the girls, no more than five minutes late. His chest still hurt, thinking about how he had felt that afternoon. Anger, assuming that the girls were late, inconsiderate. Panic , but a safe, this-will-soon-pass-and-I-can-be-angry-again panic. When forty-five minutes had passed, he checked with the mall security, and he still remembered with great affection the overweight security guard who had walked the corridors with him, his voice a rumbling bass of benign possibilities. “Maybe they took the bus home. Maybe they decided to take one of those shopper surveys, back in the offices. Maybe they got a ride home with a friend’s mother or father and thought they could get home in time to call you at your work.”

Dave had seized on the security guard’s words as if they were a promise, racing home in his VW bus, certain that the girls would be there, finding only Miriam. It had been so strange, seeing her, wanting to confront her, yet having to put aside the suddenly minor fact of her infidelity. Miriam had been marvelously calm, calling the police, agreeing that Dave should go back to the mall and continue searching while she stayed at the house in case they showed up. At 7:00 P.M., they still assumed the girls would show up. It was hard to describe how slowly that expectation, that hope-what had once seemed their right-had slipped away. Yet emotion was not linear, and the absence of a definitive answer still made Dave’s imagination jump and lurch, concocting far-fetched endings. This was the stuff of soap operas, so why shouldn’t it have a soap-opera ending? Simultaneous amnesia, an eccentric Greek billionaire whisking Dave’s children away, unharmed, to live in a Bavarian castle. Why not?

Whatever Miriam’s sins, Dave had been the one to give permission for the mall trip, and although Miriam had assured him again and again that he had not erred, he still blamed…her. He’d been distracted, anxious. At the time he’d thought he was worried about the business, but he saw in hindsight that he’d known that something was wrong in their marriage, that his subconscious was picking up signals it didn’t know how to translate. If he’d been more present that day, if he’d been focused on his daughters, he might have realized they were too young to be given that much freedom. Miriam had set him up.

He felt no guilt over Jeff Baumgarten or his wife, who had been subjected to repeated police interviews after Miriam volunteered the truth. After all, Thelma Baumgarten had been in Dave’s store at 3:00 P.M., and the store wasn’t more than three miles from the mall. The motel was even closer, as it turned out. But Dave hated Mrs. Baumgarten more than he hated Jeff. Jeff had fucked his wife, but Mrs. Baumgarten…Well, Mrs. Baumgarten, with her stupid little note, had tried to project all this on Dave. Fat little hausfrau. If she’d kept her husband happy, maybe he would have left Miriam alone.

“Were there any strong suspects along the way?” Dave looked at Chet, longing for permission, for encouragement, to tell everything about the Baumgartens. Chet shook his head, ever so slightly. It would only muddy the waters, he’d told Dave whenever he lobbied to make everything-everything-public on the grounds that every bit of truth mattered, that it was not only a virtue in and of itself, but essential to learning what had happened to his daughters. The more the public knew, the better equipped people were to help them. Maybe Mrs. Baumgarten had hired someone. Maybe Jeff Baumgarten had arranged for the children to be kidnapped to force Miriam to continue their illicit affair. Maybe something had gone wrong with his plan. Candor was liberating, Dave argued, and it would be rewarded. They should put everything out there and let the chips fall where they may.

Maybe that was why Chet had decided he should be here for the interviews. Dave couldn’t see any other reason. Very little had been held back in the early weeks of the investigation-the discovery of Heather’s purse, the calls that placed the girls in various states (South Carolina, West Virginia, Virginia, Vermont) and various states (alive and laughing, swimming and playing, eating hamburgers, bound and gagged). Funny, but those delusional types were worse than the pranksters in their own way. They thought their fantasies were helpful, but all they brought was pain.

“Do you-can you-” The Star reporter, an absolute throwback, with a hat on the back of his head and a narrow tie, groped for words in a way that Dave knew could end up in only one place. “Do you continue to hope that your daughters will be found alive?”

“Of course. Hope is essential.” Mutual amnesia, a castle in Bavaria , a gentle eccentric who wanted two golden-haired daughters, but would never, ever harm them .

“No,” Miriam said.

In the corner of the room, Chet tensed, as if he thought he might have to intercede. Had the detective finally detected something? Could he know that it was Dave’s instinct, at that very moment, to slap his wife? It wouldn’t be the first time that he had fought down that impulse in the past year. The reporters seemed shocked, too, as if Miriam had broken some unwritten protocol of the mourning parent.

“You’ll have to excuse my wife,” Dave said. “She’s very emotional, and this is such a difficult time-”

“I’m not a child who didn’t get my nap today,” Miriam said. “And I’m no more emotional today than I was yesterday or I’ll be tomorrow. I would love to be wrong about this. But if I don’t accept the probability of their deaths at this point, how do I live? How do I go on?”

The reporters did not take notes during this outburst, Dave noticed. Their instinct, like everyone else’s, always, was to protect Miriam, to assume that her inappropriate comments had come out of grief. Reporters were supposed to be cynical, and maybe they were, when they were covering stories of Watergate-like intrigue and conspiracy. But in Dave’s experience they were among the most naïve and optimistic people he had ever met.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and even he didn’t know why he was apologizing this time.

After a beat, Miriam nodded as well, rounding her shoulders in a way that invited Dave to put his arm around her. “It’s hard,” she said. “Remaining open to hope, yet needing to grieve. Whatever I do or say, I feel as if I’m betraying my daughters. We just want to know.”

“Is there a moment in the day when you’re not thinking about this?” asked the Light reporter.

The question caught Dave off guard, in part because it was new. How do you go on, how do you not think about this? Those he knew. But was he ever not thinking about the girls? Rationally, there must be such moments, but he couldn’t identify them now that he was trying. When he made preparations for dinner, he still reviewed the girls’ likes and dislikes. Meat loaf again? Stopped at a red light in afternoon traffic, he would relive the conversations they once had about the nearby Social Security Administration and why it had so many employees who clogged the streets every day at 4:00 P.M. They’ll give us money when we’re old? Cool ! If he started thinking about how much he hated Jeff Baumgarten, how he wanted to wait outside his Pikesville home and run over him with the VW bus when he came out to pick up the morning newspaper from the circular driveway-even that was really about the girls, wasn’t it? When he opened the mailbox and found his copy of New York magazine, he would see the Ronrico rum ad on the back and be reminded of how fascinated Heather was by its campy re-creations, while Sunny had giggled over the weekly word contests. Every object in the world-the collapsed lean-to that the girls had built in the backyard, the glittering green of a Genesee ale can in the gutter, Miriam’s ratty blue bathrobe-brought him back to his daughters. Conventional wisdom held that he could not continue at this level of intensity forever, that all pain fades, but he wanted to keep it going. The dull fury he felt was like a lamp lighted in the window, waiting for the girls to find their way home.

Even now his mind would not stop racing, which defeated the purpose of the Agnihotra. He had tried, delicately, to bring this up with the others who followed the Fivefold Path. Estelle Turner was long dead, of course, and Herb had wandered out to Northern California after she was gone, saying he had to cut all ties in order to go on. Dave had called him about the girls, but Herb had seemed vaguely resentful to be reminded of his prior life in Baltimore and had turned the conversation inside out so it ended up being about him, his various disillusionments and losses. “I just can’t find the way, buddy,” he said repeatedly. But then everything had been an abstraction to Herb-except for Estelle. Even the death of Herb’s own daughter had been shrugged off as some kind of spiritual test, part of his goddamn journey.

There were still others in Baltimore who followed the Fivefold Path and they had been exceptionally kind to Dave over the last twelve months, providing what Miriam dryly called a never-ending supply of soybean casseroles. Yet even these friends seemed upset when he tried to suggest that their mutual belief system might not be large enough to get him through this. What did it mean if he could not clear his mind for the daily meditation? Should he abandon it until he could find the necessary concentration, or should he continue to try, every sunrise and sunset, to empty his head and embrace the now? Here he was, coming to the end of the sunset ritual, and he remembered none of it, had failed to find any peace or contentment. Instead he was beginning to see the Agnihotra as Miriam had always seen it-a shitty smell, a greasy smoke that coated the walls of the study.

The fire was out. He bagged the ashes, which he used as fertilizer, and drifted back to the kitchen, pouring a glass of wine for himself and a shot of whiskey for Chet. As an afterthought, he gave Miriam a glass of wine, too.

“Really, Chet-has there been any progress? Can you look back at the past year and say we’ve learned anything?” He thought it was generous, using “we.” Privately, Dave thought the cops, while kind and earnest, had been nothing short of inept.

“We’ve eliminated a lot of scenarios. The Rock Glen chorus teacher. Um…others.” Even in private, Chet wouldn’t rub Miriam’s nose in the Baumgarten mess. It killed Dave how the cops had all but congratulated Miriam for being so forthcoming about the affair, how they had nodded approvingly that Sunday evening as she volunteered everything. Truthful Miriam, candid Miriam, putting aside the usual instinct of self-protection and preservation to do whatever it took to find her daughters. But if Miriam hadn’t had a talent for deceit to begin with-if she hadn’t been involved in the stupid affair-then she wouldn’t have had anything to hide. Dave sure didn’t.

Yet it was Dave who had lied at first, skipping over the part about Mrs. Baumgarten’s visit, stammering inexpertly about why he’d chosen to close the shop early and go drink beer at the tavern down the block. He’d been nervous and halting in those early interviews with police, his eyes darting around the room. Had that been the problem? Had the police been so focused on Dave’s odd behavior that they assumed he was the culprit? They denied it now, but Dave was sure he was a suspect.

“Did you chant?” Chet knew Dave’s routines well by now.

“Yeah,” Dave said. “Another day, another sunset. And in three hundred sixty-five more sunsets, will we be here again, telling the story again, hoping again that someone will come forward? Or do the anniversaries begin to space out after the first year? Five years, ten years, then twenty, then fifty?”

“Three hundred sixty-six,” Miriam said.

“What?”

“This was a leap year: 1976. So there was an extra day. It’s been three hundred sixty-six years since the girls disappeared. I mean days, three hundred sixty-six days.”

“Well, bully for you, Miriam, having it down to the day. I guess you loved them more than me, after all. Except today is the twenty-seventh, not the twenty-ninth. The reporters needed time to ready their stories and reports for the Monday papers, the actual anniversary. So it’s really day three hundred sixty-four.”

“Dave-” This was Chet’s real role in their lives, more peacemaker than policeman. But Dave already felt contrite. A year ago-well, 364 days-he had thought losing his wife would be the great tragedy of his life. Hunched over the bar at Monaghan’s, he had experienced the cuckold’s usual emotions-anger, vengeance, self-pity, fear. He’d played with the idea of divorcing Miriam, confident that he was one father who could retain custody of his children, considering the circumstances. Instead he lost his children and kept his wife.

Given a choice-but he hadn’t been given a choice. Who really was, when it came to anything that mattered? But if he had been asked to choose, he would have sacrificed Miriam in a heartbeat if it meant getting Sunny and Heather back, and it was understood that she would do the same to him. Their marriage was a brittle memorial to their lost daughters, truly the very least they could do.

He said good night to Chet and took his drink to the back porch, studying the tire swing that hung from the one truly sturdy tree in the yard, the pile of sticks and timber near the fence line. When the girls were little, they’d been fond of building forts in the backyard, lean-tos of limbs and branches, with “carpets” made from moss that they transplanted from other parts of the yard, and stores of onion grass and dandelions for their food supply. The girls had outgrown such things years ago, but their last fort had stood until this past winter, when it collapsed from the weight and moisture of the snow. Dave felt as if he lived in a house of broken sticks, as if he were, in fact, impaled on the sharp ends, the moss long dead, the supply of wild onions depleted.

CHAPTER 17

Alone at last-alone again, naturally, as the song would have it, a song that Sunny had listened to over and over again when she was eleven, eventually driving them all crazy-Miriam walked over to the sink and poured her glass of wine down the drain. She didn’t have much of a taste for alcohol anymore, not that Dave noticed such things. In order for Dave to observe how little Miriam drank these days, he would have to see how much more he drank, and that particular brand of self-knowledge didn’t interest him.

The sink was directly beneath a large window that overlooked the backyard, the only change that Miriam had sought during the house’s renovation. A woman has to have a window over the sink, she argued when she saw Dave’s original plans, in which the sink was to face a backsplash of Mexican tile. This was her mother’s dictate, and Miriam had inculcated this principle in her own daughters. She remembered Heather, arranging her Creative Playthings dollhouse. A modular affair, this open-air rectangle of blue wood was quite different from the furbelowed Victorian that Heather would have picked out for herself. It even had Danish modern furniture, made from sturdy hardwoods. “The sink has to go in front of the woman,” the rubbery mama doll told the rubbery daddy doll when Heather set it up the first time, and Miriam hadn’t corrected Heather’s mangling of her edict. The dolls had been the only flimsy things in that set, crumbling and drying as rubber inevitably does, the paint on their faces melting away. But the house and the furniture were still in Heather’s closet, waiting for…what? For whom?

Overall the girls’ rooms remained as they had been, although Miriam had finally broken down and washed the linens, making the beds that had been left tumbled and tossed, in Heather’s case, smooth and barely wrinkled in Sunny’s case. Each girl had used her own sleeping style to argue against bed making. “I’m just going to mess it up again,” Heather said. “You can barely tell I’ve been in it,” Sunny said. They had reached a compromise: Beds would be made, Monday through Friday, then left alone on the weekend. For weeks Miriam had taken great comfort in looking at those unmade beds, proof that their daughters intended to sleep in them again, that the week would return, and her daughters with it.

In the immediate aftermath-But no, “aftermath” was the wrong word, for it suggested a tangible event, something definitive. Where was the “math” in their situation, what was the “after”? In the first forty-eight hours, when nothing was known and everything was possible, Miriam felt as if she had been plunged into a cold, rushing stream, and her only instinct was to survive the shock of it all. She ate nothing, she seldom slept, and she stoked her body on caffeine because she needed to be ready, alert. The one thing she assumed, in the early going, was that an answer would be forthcoming. With the ringing of the telephone, a knock on the door, all would be revealed.

How grandiose that expectation turned out to be.

Detective Willoughby -he was not yet Chet to her, just the detective, the police officer-Detective Willoughby thought she was so brave and selfless to admit, before the weekend was over, exactly where she’d been that afternoon. “The natural instinct is to lie,” he told her. “About the smallest things. You’d be amazed how naturally and automatically people lie to police.”

“If it helps find my daughters, then who cares? And if it doesn’t…who cares?”

This was the Sunday after the girls had disappeared. The first twenty-four hours, the first forty-eight hours-everyone seemed to have a rule of thumb about the crucial window of opportunity. And everyone seemed to be wrong. There were no rules, Miriam found out. They didn’t have to wait, for example, to report the girls missing. The police had taken them seriously from the very first call, sending officers to the house and then to the mall, where they walked through the thinning Saturday-evening crowds with Miriam and Dave. Other people had been helpful, too. The usher at the cinema remembered the girls-and remembered that they had bought tickets for Escape to Witch Mountain, then tried to sneak into Chinatown . Miriam had a strange surge of pride in Sunny, hearing that. Docile, goody-goody Sunny, sneaking into an R-rated movie-and such a good one at that. Miriam didn’t know she had it in her. When she saw her again, she wouldn’t be angry, not in the least. In fact, she would sit down with Sunny and the movie listings, ask her if there were other R movies she wanted to see. Coppola, Fellini, Herzog-she and Sunny would become art house aficionados together.

What other promises did she make that Saturday evening? She would find her way back to some sort of spiritual life. Not Dave’s Fivefold Path, but maybe Judaism or, in a pinch, the Unitarian Church. And she wouldn’t hock Dave anymore about the path, wouldn’t tease him about the fact that he had adopted a spiritual practice because he envied the material goods of the people who introduced him to it. Much as she was grateful to the Turners, she didn’t share Dave’s gaga admiration of them. Their generosity to the Bethanys had been rooted in selfishness, contradictory as that might sound.

Other promises. She would be a better mother, making good meals, relying less on Chinese takeout and Marino’s pizza. The girls’ laundry would be done with meticulous care. Perhaps it was time to redecorate Sunny’s room, to mark the rite of passage into high school next year? And wasn’t Heather going to outgrow the elaborate Where the Wild Things Are border in her room, beautiful as it was? Miriam had made that by buying two copies of the book, breaking the binding, then shellacking the pages to the wall, so the entire story was told. They could go, the three of them, to the flea market at Westview Drive-In and the Purple Heart, find old furniture and paint it bright, mod colors. Good linens couldn’t be faked, so she would have to shop the so-called white sales at the department stores, come next January-

All of this was going through Miriam’s head that evening when the sight of the blue denim bag, which looked like a stain in the dim light of the parking lot, brought her back from the future with an abrupt, sickening thump. She gave a little cry and fell to her knees in the parking lot, but the young officer had restrained her.

“Don’t touch it, ma’am. We should-Please, ma’am. There’s a way to do this.”

Little girls lose things. Purses and keys and hair ribbons and schoolbooks and jackets and sweaters and hats and mittens. To lose things is the nature of childhood. Being separated from this purse would be reason enough for Heather-stubborn, materialistic Heather-to refuse to go home, tracing and retracing her steps again and again and again and again. “Have you ever stopped to think,” Miriam had asked her just a few weeks before, “why when you find something you lost, it’s always in the last place you look?” How Heather had rejoiced in that bit of verbal tomfoolery, once she got it. Literal-minded Sunny had simply said, “Of course it is.”

On her knees in the parking lot, Miriam yearned to grab the purse as if it were her daughter, but the young officer continued to hold her back. There was a mark on it-a footprint, a tire track. How Heather would anguish over that. The purse had come with two other sheaths, but this denim one was Heather’s favorite. They would replace it, no recriminations about her carelessness. And tomorrow they would have an Easter-egg hunt, although the girls had claimed they were too old this year. That is, Sunny had said she was too old, not to bother, and Heather had swiftly agreed. A special hunt, with chocolates but also amazing treasures. Miriam could get the candy eggs from High’s, but where would she find treasures at this time of night? The mall was open for another twenty minutes or so. Or she could go to the Blue Guitar and help herself to Dave’s wares, and who cared how red the ink ran? She would pick out jewelry and toys and ceramic vases, which could be used for the daffodils and crocuses just beginning to poke their heads into the world.

Life was never as sharp again as it was at that moment. With each day as the possibility of an answer receded a little more, Miriam’s senses dulled. The girls would not be found unharmed. The girls would not be found alive. The girls would not be found…intact, the all-purpose euphemism that Miriam used to denote everything from sexual assault to actual dismemberment. But it was a long time before it occurred to anyone that the girls might not be found.

And Miriam had been waiting for the girls to be found, she realized, not just because she was desperate to know what had happened but because she’d been planning to leave Dave once this was settled. The tragedy of their daughters-the blame of it, the weight of it-was marital property as surely as the house and the furniture and the store. She needed to know the whole story so that it could be divided between them, fifty-fifty, fair and square. But what if the ending never came? Did she have to stay with Dave? Even if she were to blame for her daughters’ deaths-and Miriam, in her darkest moments, could not believe that any god, in any belief system, would kill two children to punish a philandering mother, and if there were such a god, she wanted no part of him or her or it-did she have to serve a life sentence in this marriage? It had been deadening enough before, leavened only by their joy in the girls. How long did she have to stay? How much did she owe Dave?

She studied her reflection in the window above the sink. A woman must have a window over her sink, her mother had said. Washing dishes is so boring there must be a view. To her knowledge it was the only demand her mother had ever uttered. Certainly, she had never questioned that it was the woman who would wash the dishes and make the meals and clean the house, much less seek a place for herself outside the house. Women of Miriam’s generation were beginning to ask for so much, but her mother, miserable as she was living in Ottawa, had asked for nothing but a window, and Miriam had followed suit. Here, during daylight hours, she could see the large, overgrown-verging-on-wild yard. The wildness was a carefully cultivated illusion. Miriam had tended to her yard as she had reared her children, allowing it to follow its instincts, respecting what was there-honeysuckle, mint, jack-in-the-pulpit-and not trying to force things that were never meant to be, such as roses or hydrangeas. The things she added had been compatible, unobtrusive, perennials capable of thriving in the shade.

But once the sun went down, all the window provided was one’s own face. The woman that Miriam saw looked exhausted, yet still attractive. She would have no problem finding a new man. In fact, men seemed more drawn to her than ever in the past year. Chet clearly had a crush on her, and not only because she was a damsel in distress. The knowledge of Miriam’s affair, the secret that he had continued to safeguard, excited him. She was a bad woman. And Willoughby, despite being a detective, didn’t seem to have a lot of firsthand experience with bad women.

Other men, not privy to what Willoughby knew, were attracted to Miriam by the palpable sense of doom and damage, the exhausted eyes that clearly said, I’m out of the game . It was frightening, really, how many men responded to damage in a woman. Yes, she could easily find another man. But she didn’t want another man. What she wanted was an excuse to leave, a definitive reason to go upstairs, pack a bag and drive away, without being seen as the cold, unnatural woman who had abandoned her husband when he needed her most. The husband who had forgiven her, so generously, so unstintingly. Then again, how magnanimous was a gesture if one were constantly aware of its magnanimity?

She would give it six more months. That would take them to October. But October had been so hard on Dave last fall-the beautiful weather, Halloween, with neighborhood children in their costumes. November, December? But the holidays were more painful still. January brought Sunny’s birthday, and then it would be March again, the second anniversary, with Heather’s birthday the following week. There would never be a right time to leave, Miriam thought. There would just be a time. Soon.

She imagined herself on the highway, heading to… Texas. She knew a girl from her college days who had settled in Austin and raved about its free-and-easy lifestyle. Miriam saw herself in her car, driving west, then south through Virginia, through the long Shenandoah Valley, past the destinations they had visited with the girls-Luray Caverns, Skyline Drive, Monticello-deeper and deeper, all the way to Abingdon and into Tennessee. She experienced a chill. Ah, right. Abingdon was the locale of another alleged sighting. A well-intentioned one, but those clueless busybodies bothered Miriam more than the out-and-out hoaxes did.

Of all the things that she had cause to resent, Miriam most despised how her private tragedy had become a public one, something that others claimed to be affected by. Look at these reporters today, pretending they had a clue how she felt. The deluded witnesses were just another variation, people seeking ownership, as if the “ Bethany girls” were a public resource or treasure, too great for one family to own, like the Hope Diamond down in the Smithsonian. Of course, that gem was said to be cursed.

The Hope Diamond made her think of that huge diamond that Richard Burton gave Elizabeth Taylor. Miriam remembered watching the once-glorious couple on Here’s Lucy, with Sunny and Heather. Lucille Ball always made Miriam slightly anxious; a beautiful woman should not have to be so silly to get attention. Beauty was its own excuse for being-just look at Elizabeth Taylor if you doubted that fact. But the girls loved Lucy as if she were a cherished aunt, and the comedienne had raised them in a sense, amusing them many an afternoon, on the fuzzy feed from one of the Washington stations. Even the girls recognized that the current nighttime series couldn’t begin to touch the magic of the original, but they watched out of loyalty. In the show Miriam remembered, Ball tried on Taylor ’s ring and couldn’t get it off. High jinks ensued, with lots of popping eyes and wide mouths.

People tried on Miriam’s pain in that way, modeled it for her, almost as if they expected her to be flattered by their interest. But they never had any trouble shedding it when the time came. They plucked it off and handed it back to her, continuing with their blessedly uneventful lives.

CHAPTER 18

It had taken a lot of begging and promising and negotiating, but she finally got permission to attend a party. She had argued-well, not argued, a voice raised in anger was considered unacceptable-she had said that it would appear odd, forever saying no to the invitations at school. She was supposed to be a kid like any other, and kids went to parties. Uncle and Auntie, as she had been instructed to call them in public, were keen not to seem odd to others. That made sense to her, given all the secrets they were keeping and all the lies they were telling, but she couldn’t understand how they managed to hide their oddness from themselves. How could they not know how weird they were, how out of step in every way? Outside the house it was 1976, the year of the Bicentennial, in the middle of a decade that had proved that anything could happen, even in a small town such as this. A war had ended, a president had been toppled, because people had demanded change. Spoke for it, marched for it, died for it in some cases. She was not thinking of the soldiers in Vietnam. She never thought about them. She was thinking about Kent State, an event she wished she’d paid more attention to when it happened, but she’d been so much younger then. It wasn’t the kind of thing that a little girl could understand, much less care about.

She cared about it now, though. In the library she had found a copy of Time magazine with the photo of the girl crouching by the boy. The girl was a runaway, dislocated, not where she was supposed to be, and she had wandered into history. The photograph became a kind of promise: She could run away. She could find history. And if she found history, if she could do something large and important enough, then maybe she could be forgiven.

But, for now, she was happy to be in a basement party room in a house in town, waiting to see if anyone would call her number for Five Minutes in Heaven. The game had started contentiously, not because some girls didn’t want to play-everyone had been eager to play-but because there was much disagreement on how long couples should stay in the closet. Some said two, citing no less an authority than Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, while others said it should be seven, because that sounded right: Seven Minutes in Heaven. “We’ll split the difference,” decreed the hostess, Kathy. A popular girl but a nice one, she wielded her power with grace. If Kathy said it was okay to play Five Minutes in Heaven, then it was definitely okay.

That was something else that Uncle and Auntie didn’t know about the world right outside their door: Sex was everywhere, even here, even among the very young, especially among the very young. Doctor, Spin the Bottle, now Five Minutes (or Two or Seven) in Heaven. Sex came first, well before drinking and drugs, although drugs were largely disdained here. Too hippie-ish. Her classmates were groping their way into adolescence, literally and figuratively.

She was the only one having full-out intercourse in a feather bed, however. She was pretty sure of that, not that she dared to compare notes. If she told anyone about life at home, they would take her away, and that might actually be worse.

It was hard to think about kissing in daylight, on a Saturday afternoon. Sex was a nighttime activity, grim and silent, in a house where everyone pretended not to hear the squeak of the springs, the way the bedstead swayed, pressing against the wall with a muted thump, like waves lapping a pier. Waves against a pier…She was in Annapolis, at the clam festival. She was eight. She wore orange-and-pink culottes. She didn’t like clams, but she liked the festival. Everyone was happy, back when she was eight.

By day she was a distant cousin, arrived from Ohio, saddled with a name she truly hated, Ruth. So plain, so stark that name. Ruth. If she had to have a new one, why not Cordelia or Geraldine, one of the names that Anne of Green Gables had chosen for herself? But Uncle explained that the choices were limited, and Ruth was the best he could do. Ruth was a real girl, once upon a time, a girl who lived to be only three or four, then burned up in a fire with her whole family in a place called Bexley. Ruth had a different birthday than she did, so they put her in the wrong grade, which she had expected to be boring and repetitive. But her new school, Shrine of the Little Flower, was actually harder than her old one. She wasn’t sure if that was because of the nuns or the fact that the class was small, maybe both. With so much schoolwork, she didn’t have time to learn all the things she should know about her new self, and she worried that someone was going to ask her questions about Ohio that she couldn’t answer-the capital, the state flower, the state bird. But no one ever did. Her new classmates had grown up together and had little experience dealing with strangers. And they’d been instructed explicitly not to talk to Ruth about the horrible things that had happened to her family back in Ohio.

One girl, someone who would have been called a spastic back home, although that term didn’t appear to be in use here, asked her about the cigars.

“Cigars?”

“From the burns?”

“Oh. Scars.” She needed to think for only a second. Lying was becoming second nature to her. “They’re where you can’t see them.”

She regretted this, because it got back to the boys from Little Flower and they had been gossiping about who might be the first to see Ruth’s secret scars. Even today, when Five Minutes in Heaven was proposed, she saw Jeffrey point to her and punch Bill in the arm, saying in a hoarse stage whisper, “Maybe you’ll get to see Ruth’s scars.” She knew that Jeffrey liked her, that his teasing was a form of flirtation, but she was too tired to care. If the girls at Little Flower didn’t know what to do with a new girl, the boys did, or thought they did. They liked her, mysterious, forbidden Ruth, with her tragic history that no one was supposed to mention. She worried that they could smell all the sex on her, despite the long showers she took morning and night, earning her harsh lectures about the limits of well water and the cost of natural gas.

“Forty-seven!” Bill called out. That was her number. The other kids whooped, as they did each time. She walked to the closet with as much dignity as possible, knowing that Bill was capering after her, making faces at his buddies behind her back. Again, this was what all the confident boys did, she reminded herself.

The closet was really a pantry, where Kathy’s mom put up her summer canning. Tomatoes and peppers and peaches stared down at them. They made her think of the jars in a horror movie, of the brains floating in brine in Young Frankenstein. Abbie. Abbie Normal! That would be a good fake name. Auntie put up food, too, and made wonderful jams and preserves. Apple, peach, plum, cherries-No, don’t think about the cherry tree. There was a large cooler on the floor, and they sat on it, hip to hip, shy and awkward.

“What do you want to do?” Bill asked.

“What do you want to do?” she countered.

He shrugged, as if the situation bored him, as if he’d seen it all and done it all.

“Do you want to kiss me?” she ventured.

“Yeah, I guess.”

His breath tasted of cake and potato chips, which was kind of pleasant. He parted his lips but didn’t try to put his tongue in her mouth. And he kept his hands to his sides, almost as if he were afraid to touch her.

“Nice,” she said, being polite but also meaning it.

“Do you want to do it again?”

“Sure.” They had five minutes.

This time he stuck the tiniest tip of his tongue between her lips and let it hang there, barely breathing, as if he expected her to object or push him away. Instead she had to concentrate on not widening her mouth reflexively and drawing his tongue in the rest of the way. She was well trained by now, expert in the techniques it took to speed through the nightly transaction. What would Ruth, the real Ruth, do, if she hadn’t burned up in a fire when she was four years old? What would Ruth know, how would she act? The tip of Bill’s tongue rested on her lower lip, like a fleck of food or a strand of hair she wanted to brush away. But she let it stay.

“What else do you want to do?” Bill asked, pulling back to breathe.

He didn’t know, she realized. He had no idea of all the things that could be done, even in five minutes. For one moment she considered showing him, but she knew that would be disastrous. When their five minutes finally ended with the others pounding on the closet door, screaming at them to put back on the clothes that weren’t even disheveled, Bill was still as ignorant as she wished she were. Then Kathy’s mother called downstairs that it was time to go home, and she didn’t have to call anyone’s number.

“HOW WAS THE PARTY?” Uncle asked.

“Boring,” she said, telling the truth, but a truth she knew that would make him happy. If the party were boring, maybe she wouldn’t want to go to another one. He worried about her when she was out in public, without someone in the family watching her. He didn’t quite trust her when she was out of the house. Besides, she liked to make him happy. In his own strange way, he was on her side, and no one else in the house really was, not even the dogs, who were rough and nasty, good only for muddying coats and tearing her tights.

“I thought I’d go outside,” she said.

“Cold as it is?”

“Just around the property. Not far.”

She walked to the orchard, to the cherry tree. This time of year, it was hard to say if one really saw buds or if it was just wishful thinking, a trick of the March dusk, creating gray-green shadows that looked like the promise of new life.

“I kissed a boy today,” she told the tree, the twilight, the ground. No one was impressed, but the normalcy of it made her feel that maybe she could be normal again, that she could retrace her steps and get things right. One day.

She was Ruth, from Bexley, Ohio. Her whole family burned up in a fire when she was three or four. She had jumped out the second-floor window, breaking her ankle. That’s why she was a grade behind where she should be, because of all the time in the hospital. No, she had not been left back. She just didn’t get to do any schoolwork that year. And school was different in Ohio. That’s why she didn’t know some things she should know.

Yes, she had scars, but they weren’t where you could see them, even when she wore a bathing suit.