What The Dead Know

CHAPTER 19

“I can’t,” she said. “I just can’t.”

Odd, the things that stuck with you from school. Infante hadn’t been much of a student, but he’d liked history for a while there. In Jane Doe’s hospital room Friday morning-and he was insisting on thinking of her as Jane Doe, now more than ever-Infante was reminded of something he once heard about Louis XIV. Or maybe XVI. The point was, he remembered how certain kings made their servants watch them dress, and that was supposed to establish their power. Dress and bathe and God knows what else. As a fourteen-year-old in Massapequa, he hadn’t bought it. Who looked less powerful than a naked man, or a guy taking a dump? But watching Jane D. do her thing this morning, the history lesson came back to him.

Which isn’t to say she was disrobing for him-anything but. She was still in her hospital gown, her bony shoulders draped with a bright shawl. Yet she was ordering around Gloria and the hospital social worker, what’s-her-name, in this very queenly fashion, acting as if he weren’t in the room at all. If he didn’t know the first thing about her-and, again, he was sticking by that notion-he would have diagnosed her a rich bitch, or a daddy’s girl at the very least, someone used to getting her way. With men and women. These two were jumping, vying for the right to do things for her.

“My clothes-” she began, eyeing the outfit she had been wearing when she was admitted, and even Kevin could see why she wouldn’t want to put them on again. They were sweat-type things, a loose top and yoga pants, the Under Armor brand that was so hot locally, and they were giving off a stale smell-not the hard-core acrid odor of a workout but that slept-in, lived-in-too-long kind of smell. He wondered how many miles she had driven in them before the accident. All the way from Asheville ? Then how did you buy gas, with no billfold or cash ? Could she have flung her wallet out of the car? Gloria kept trying to portray the events after the accident as pure panic, the faulty decisions made by adrenaline. But you could counter that it was all calculated, that she had fled the scene to give herself time to come up with a story.

A story that had been enlarged to include a cop-perpetrator when this woman learned that the state’s attorney thought she should be grand juried or locked up. And sure enough, the state’s attorney had blinked, agreed to let her stay out of jail as long as Gloria would vouch for her remaining in Baltimore. Infante had to admit, a person would have to be really ballsy to flee Gloria. She’d hunt the woman down for her fee alone.

“There’s a Salvation Army over on Patapsco Avenue,” said the social worker. Kay, that was it. “Really, they have some very nice things.”

“ Patapsco Avenue,” Lady X said in a musing, remembering tone, a little arch to Infante’s ears. “I think there was a discount seafood place up there, once upon a time. It’s where my family bought crabs.”

He jumped on that. “You came all the way over here to buy seafood, living in Northwest Baltimore?”

“My dad was big on bargains. Bargains and…idiosyncrasy. You know, why drive ten minutes for steamed crabs if you could go clear across the city, save a buck a dozen, and have a story to tell? Come to think of it, wasn’t there a place around here that served deep-fried green-pepper rings dipped in powdered sugar?”

Kay shook her head. “I’ve heard people speak of them, but I’ve lived in Baltimore my whole life and never seen such a thing on any menu.”

“Just because you don’t see something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.” She was queenly again, lifting her chin. “I sat in plain sight for years and no one ever saw me.”

Good, she was finally in the neighborhood of where this conversation should have been going all along. “Your appearance wasn’t altered at all?”

“Nice’n Easy took my hair two shades darker. I asked to be a redhead like Anne of Green Gables, but what I wanted was seldom of interest.” She met his gaze. “I’m guessing you weren’t much of an L. M. Montgomery fan.”

“Who was he?” he asked obediently, knowing he was being set up, letting the trio of women laugh at him. He could afford such laughter-use it to his advantage, even. Let her think he was an idiot. Wouldn’t it be great if Gloria went on the clothes-shopping mission with Kay? But he was never going to get that lucky. “Seriously-”

“I started to grow,” she said, as if anticipating where he was going. “And although everyone knew that I’d have to grow if I was still alive, I think that was part of the reason no one ever recognized me. That, and being just the one.”

“Yeah, your sister. What happened to her? That would be a good place to start.”

“No,” she said. “It wouldn’t be.”

“Gloria said you had lots to say. About a cop, in fact. I was summoned here this morning on the understanding that you were ready to tell me everything.”

“I can do the generalities. I’m still not sure I should deal in specifics, yet. I don’t feel that you’re on my side.”

“You’re saying you’re a victim, a hostage held against her will, and you’re implying that your sister was killed. Why wouldn’t I be on your side?”

“See, there it is: You’re saying. Not that I am but that I claim to be. Your skepticism makes it very hard for me to trust you. That, and the likelihood that you’ll do everything you can to discredit a story that doesn’t reflect well on one of your department’s own.”

She had hit a nerve there, but he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of seeing how much it bugged him, how it had set off all sorts of alarms in the department. “It’s a way of talking, that’s all. Don’t read so much into it.”

She ran her right hand, the one that wasn’t bandaged, through her hair, and held his gaze. Their game of visual chicken dragged on until she blinked, fluttering her eyelids as if exhausted. Yet he had the sense that she was simply allowing him the illusion of winning, that she could have gone much longer. Piece o’ work, this one, a real piece o’ work.

“I knew a girl-” she began, behind closed eyes.

“Heather Bethany? Penelope Jackson?”

“This was high school. While I was still with him.”

“Where-”

“Later. In good time.” Eyes open now, but trained on the wall to her left. “I knew a girl, and she was popular. A cheerleader, a good student. Sweet, though. The kind of girl that adults admired. She dated, a lot. Older boys, college boys. In-where this was-there was a lake, and kids went there on date nights to drink and make out. Her parents didn’t want her to be in cars late at night, driving on those roads with inexperienced boys. So they made her a deal. If she would bring her dates home, to their house, they would respect her privacy. She and her date would have the rec room to themselves. There would be no curfew. Beer could be consumed, within reason. After all, they could have crossed the state line, where the drinking age was eighteen at the time. In the rec room, they could drink beer and watch television and know that-short of her screaming ‘Fire!’ or ‘Rape!’-no parent would enter the room. Her parents would stay in their bedroom, two floors away, and respect her privacy. What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know.” Christ, I don’t care. But he had to pretend that he did. This one drank up attention like water.

“She did everything. Everything. She perfected the art of the blow job. She lost her virginity. Her parents thought they had figured it out so neatly, that they could give her freedom and she would be too inhibited to use it. They thought she wouldn’t really take them at their word, that she would worry about them crossing the threshold. So here was this girl, this sweet, popular girl, all but starring in pornos in her parents’ rec room, and it didn’t change her reputation one whit.”

“Is this a story about you?”

“No. It’s a story about perceptions, about what you get to be in public and what you are in private. Right now I’m a private person. Anonymous, unknown, ordinary. But when I start to tell you what happened to me, you’re going to think I’m dirty. Nasty. You won’t be able to help yourself. The cheerleader in the basement can give out all the blow jobs she likes. But the little girl who doesn’t try to escape from her captor and abuser, who gets raped every night, she’s harder to understand. She must have liked it, if she didn’t run away. Right? And that’s without the guy being a cop on top of everything else.”

“I’m a police,” he said. “I don’t blame victims.”

“But you categorize them, right? You feel differently about, say, a woman beaten to death by her husband than you do about a drug dealer killed by a rival. That’s just human nature. And you’re human-right?” Kevin glanced over at Gloria. In his experience, she kept her clients on a tight leash, interrupting and directing interviews. But she was letting this one run the show. In fact, she seemed a little mesmerized by her. “I want to help you, but I want to preserve what little normalcy I have. I don’t want to be the freak of the week on all those news channels. I don’t want police officers poking around in my present life, talking to neighbors and coworkers and bosses.”

“And friends? Family?”

“I don’t have those.”

“But you know we’re trying to find your mother, Miriam, down in Mexico.”

“Are you sure she’s alive? Because-” She stopped herself.

“Because what? Because you think she’s dead? Because you counted on her being dead?”

“Why don’t you ever use my name when you speak to me?”

“What?”

“Gloria does. Kay does. But you never call me anything. You used my mother’s name just then, but you’ve never used mine. Don’t you believe me?”

She listened well, better than most. You had to really listen to pick up on the omissions in another person’s conversation, and she was right-there was no way he was going to call her Heather. He didn’t believe her, plain and simple, had her pegged as a liar from the first time he met her. “Look, it’s not about belief or trust or sympathy. I like to work from established facts. Things that can be verified, and you haven’t really given me any of those. Why were you so sure your mother was dead?”

“Around the time I turned eighteen-”

“What year was that?”

“ April third, 1981. Please, Detective. I know my own birthday. No small miracle, given how many different birthdays I’ve had in my life.”

“Heather Bethany’s birthday is on the Internet. It was in the news stories. Everyone knows that Heather Bethany was just days away from her twelfth birthday when she disappeared.”

She didn’t bother to answer things she didn’t want to answer, more evidence of her shrewdness. “Anyway, around the time I turned eighteen, I was on my own. Cut loose, put on a bus, given lovely parting gifts, and sayonara.”

“He freed you, just like that? Kept you for six years and then waved bye-bye, with no fear of where you would go or what you would tell people?”

“He told me every day that my parents didn’t want me, that no one was looking for me, that I had no family to return to, that my parents had broken up and moved away. Eventually I came to believe that.”

“Still, what happens when you’re eighteen? Why does he let you go?”

She shrugged. “He’d lost interest. I was less…malleable as time went on. Still under his thumb, but beginning to nip at that thumb, make my own demands. It was time for me to support myself. I got on a bus-”

“Where?”

“Not yet. I won’t tell you where I started. But I got off in Chicago. It was so cold for April. I never knew April could be so cold. And there was a ticker-tape parade downtown, for the shuttle astronauts who had just returned. I remember wandering out of the bus station, into the Loop, and finding myself in the aftermath of this huge celebration. But I had missed the good part. All that was left was the trash.”

“That’s a nice story, I guess. Is it true or is it just a metaphor?”

“You’re smart.” Admiring and insulting at the same time.

“Why wouldn’t I be? Because I’m a cop?”

“Because you’re handsome.” To his own irritation he blushed, although it was far from the first time a woman had praised his looks. “It cuts both ways, you know. Men think pretty girls are dumb, but women think the same thing about a certain kind of man. One of the worst things you can do, as a woman, is have a boyfriend prettier than yourself. You could never be my boyfriend, Detective Infante.”

Through all of this, Gloria Bustamante had been still as a stone gooney-eyed gargoyle, but now she cleared her throat noisily, filling the awkward silence. Maybe she was even more freaked out by this conversation than Infante was.

“Heather does have something she’s willing to give you,” Gloria said. “A factoid, something you can check out and it will go a long way to establishing the authenticity of all her claims.”

“Why can’t she just give a statement?” he asked. “Dates, times, places. The name of the man who kidnapped her and killed her sister. She lived with him for six years. Presumably she knows his goddamn name.”

The woman in the hospital bed-he was running out of ways to think of her-jumped in, eyes gleaming. “Did you know that ‘factoid’ actually means false? Originally. Its meaning has…migrated, if you will, so the dictionary now accepts ‘small fact’ as one of its definitions. I was kind of disappointed in that. I think language should hold the line, not allow its own corruption.”

“I’m not here to talk about language.”

“Okay, here’s what you want. Up Interstate 83, just over the Pennsylvania line, the first exit, up around Shrewsbury. It wasn’t very developed then, and street names may have changed. But there was a farm on something called Old Town Road, which ran from Glen Rock to Shrewsbury, all the way to York. The farm used a P.O. box to get its mail, but there was a mailbox at the foot of the drive, and the number was 13350. The driveway is a mile long, almost exactly. The house was stone, the door was painted bright red. There was a barn. Not far from the barn was an orchard. You’ll find my sister’s grave there, beneath a cherry tree.”

“How many cherry trees are there?”

“Several, and there were other kinds of trees mixed in as well. Apple and pear, a few dogwoods for color. Over time, when I wasn’t being observed, I managed to scratch a random pattern into the bark. Not her initials. That would have been noticed. Just a little ring of X’s.”

“We’re talking thirty years ago. The tree could be gone. The house could be gone. Earth moves.”

“But property records remain. And if you research the address I’ve given you, then I’m confident that you’ll find a name you’ll be able to cross-reference with the personnel files of the Baltimore County Police Department.”

“Why not just tell me the fuckin’ name of the man who did this to you?”

“I want you to believe me. I want you to see the farm, see his name on the records, then match it with your own files. I want you to have my sister’s bones. Then when you find him-if you find him, he could be dead for all I know-you’ll know that much is true.”

“Why not go there with us and show me? Wouldn’t that be simpler, and faster?” Or is simple and fast the one thing you don’t want, girlie? What are you stalling for? What’s your angle?

“That,” she said, “is the one thing I will never do. Not even after almost twenty-five years. I never want to see that place again.”

He believed that much-but only that much. The fear in her face was real, the shudder in her shoulders visible even beneath the shawl. She could not stomach the thought of this journey. Wherever she’d been headed Tuesday night, it wasn’t Pennsylvania.

But that still didn’t mean that she was Heather Bethany.

CHAPTER 20

Heather wrinkled up her nose the moment she crossed the threshold into the Forrest house.

“I’m allergic to cats,” she told Kay, speaking as if Kay were a dim-witted real-estate agent. “This won’t work.”

“But I thought you understood-I told you my son, Seth, was earning extra money by looking after the family’s plants and pets.”

“I guess I heard only the plant part. I’m sorry, but-” She turned her head and sneezed, a dainty, dry sneeze. A catlike sneeze, in fact. “In just minutes I’ll be all red and puffy. I couldn’t possibly stay here.”

Her cheeks did seem to be reddening, her eyes watering. Kay followed Heather back outside, onto the fieldstone porch on the front of the house. A black woman was walking down the street with her daughter, and although the girl was astride a bike with training wheels, she was outrageously well dressed in a pale yellow pinafore and matching shoes. The mother wore a complementary shade of celery green. She turned to study the two women on the porch, clearly suspicious of them. A neighbor, Cynthia something. Mrs. Forrest had said she was a one-woman neighborhood watch, that she wouldn’t have worried about the house at all during their vacation if it weren’t for the plants and the cat, Felix. Kay waved, hoping the gesture would reassure the woman, but she did not wave back or even smile, just narrowed her eyes and nodded curtly as if in warning. I see you. I’ll remember you if anything happens.

“Well, now I’m stumped,” Kay said. “You can’t stay here, but I can’t take you back to the hospital either. And without those options-”

“Not jail,” Heather said, her voice raspy and hoarse, but maybe it was still the effect of the cat. “Kay, you have to see why a woman who’s accusing a police officer wouldn’t feel safe there. It’s hard enough having a cop posted wherever I stay. And not a shelter,” she added, as if in anticipation of Kay’s next question. “I just couldn’t do a shelter. Too many rules. I’m not great with rules, with other people telling me what to do.”

“That’s true of emergency shelters, where beds are given out daily on a first-come, first-served basis. But there are mid-range placements, too. Not many, but if I made some calls-”

“It just wouldn’t work for me. I’m used to being alone.”

“You’ve never lived with anyone? I mean, not since…”

“Since I left the farm? Oh, I’ve moved in with a boyfriend a time or two. But it’s not for me.” She smiled with one half of her mouth. “I have intimacy issues. Go figure.”

“You’ve been to counseling, then?”

“No.” Fierce, insulted. “What makes you think that?”

“I just assumed… I mean, by the phrases you used. And because of what you’ve been through? It would seem…”

Heather sat on the porch, and although Kay could feel the cold and damp through the soles of her shoes, it seemed only right to join her there, to be on her level, instead of looming over her.

“What would I tell a shrink? And what would a shrink tell me back? My life was taken from me when I was barely a teenager. My sister was killed in front of me. The fact is, I think I’ve done pretty well. Up until seventy-two hours ago, my life was fine.”

“And by fine you mean…”

“I had a job. Nothing impressive or fascinating, but I did it well and I paid my bills. On weekends, when the weather was good, I biked. If the weather was bad, I picked a recipe out of a book, something challenging, and tried to replicate it. I had as many failures as successes, but that’s part of the learning process. I rented movies. I read books. I was-You wouldn’t call it happy. I gave up on happy a long time ago.”

“Content?” Kay thought about how sorry she had felt for herself after the divorce, how easily she had tossed around words such as unhappy and sad and depressed.

“That’s closer to it. Not unhappy. That’s what I aspired to.”

“That’s so sad.”

“I’m alive. That’s more than my sister got.”

“What about your parents, though? Did you ever think about what they must be feeling?”

Heather tapped two fingers against pursed lips. Kay had noticed the gesture before. It was almost as if the answer were right there, inside her mouth, ready to jump out, but she first wanted to think through all the consequences.

“Can we have secrets?”

“Legally? I have no standing-”

“Not legally. I know that you could be forced to tell what you know in a courtroom. But I don’t expect to see the inside of a courtroom. Gloria says I won’t even have to talk to a grand jury. As people, human beings, can we have secrets?”

“You mean, can you trust me?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.” Heather instantly registered that her words were hurtful, unkind. “Kay, I don’t trust anyone. How could I? But really, in my own fucked-up way, don’t you think I’m a success story? The fact that I get up every day and I breathe and I feed myself and I go to work and I do my job and I come home and watch crap television, then get up the next day and do it all over again, and I never hurt anyone”-here, her lip started to tremble-“never hurt anyone on purpose.”

“The child in the accident is going to be fine. No brain injury, no spinal-cord damage.”

“No brain damage,” Heather repeated bitterly. “Just a broken leg. Oh, boy!”

“For which the father is equally at fault, if not more so. Consider his pain.”

“To be truthful, that’s hard for me. Other people’s pain. When I’m at work and I hear people talking about what they think is painful or difficult, it’s like I want to explode, want something horrible and slimy to burst from my innards, like in a science-fiction film. Other people’s notions of pain are pretty lame. This father, okay, he can beat himself up all he likes about what happened. But he was reacting to my error-”

“An error caused by road conditions that weren’t your fault,” Kay reminded her.

“Yeah, but…do you think the person in the previous accident, much less the half-assed county worker who didn’t hose down the highway properly-do you think they’ve even made the connection? No, and they never will. Blame falls where it falls, fair or not.”

They had wandered away from whatever Heather had been on the verge of confiding. Kay wondered if she could guide her back there. Her interest was not prurient, she was sure of that this time. She felt as if she might be the closest thing Heather had to a disinterested ally. The police, Gloria-this woman was almost secondary to their agendas. Kay didn’t care who she was now, she didn’t care about solving the mystery of her disappearance.

“We can have secrets,” she said, remembering the original phrase. “You can tell me things, and I won’t repeat them, not unless they involve harming yourself or someone else.”

Another ragged half grin. “Everyone has a loophole.”

“It’s called ethics.”

“Okay, here’s my secret: Once I was on my own, I tried to keep track of my parents, over the years. My dad was easy to find, because he was at the old house. I was told he wasn’t, but he was. But my mom-I couldn’t find my mom. That is, I found her, then I lost her again about sixteen years ago. I assumed she was dead, but I didn’t look that hard, didn’t do everything I knew how to do. It was a weird kind of relief, thinking she was dead, because I had come to believe what they told me, that she didn’t care, that she wouldn’t want to see me.”

“How could you believe that?”

A shrug, so like a teenager’s, like Kay’s own daughter, Grace.

“As for my dad,” she said, not even bothering to answer Kay’s question. “As for my dad, a day came when…well, I don’t want to get too specific. A day came when I knew he wasn’t at the same address anymore, and I couldn’t imagine him moving. This would have been in 1990 or so. He would have been in his fifties then. That freaked me out, because it had to be, you know, a heart thing or cancer. So I’ve been walking around, assuming I wouldn’t live much past fifty. Now they say my mother’s alive, but I just can’t believe it. She’s been dead to me for so long. And I’ve been dead to her, most likely. The fact is, much as I want to see her, I’m kind of dreading it, too. Because she’s not going to be the person I’ve been remembering all this time, and I’m not going to be the person she’s been remembering.”

“Did you ever-I’m sorry, this may be inappropriate.”

“Feel free.”

“Did you ever look at those drawings on the Internet? The ones that attempted to guess what you would look like as you aged?”

This time her smile was genuine, not ironic. “Pretty spooky, huh? How close they came. It can’t work that way for everyone. I mean, some people get fat. Oh-sorry.”

If it hadn’t been for the apology, Kay would not have connected that remark to herself. She’d noticed this childlike tactlessness in Heather before.

“Look,” Heather said, her gaffe already behind her, “I’m sure you don’t make much money, but couldn’t you put me up in a motel, some old chain? The Quality Inn on Route 40 may not still be there, but something like that. You could put it on a credit card, and assuming we get all this sorted out before long, I’ll be able to pay you back. Hey, maybe my mom will pay you back.”

The thought seemed to amuse her.

“I’m sorry, Heather,” Kay said, “but my kids and I live pretty close to the bone. And it’s just not right. I’m a social worker. There are lines that I can’t cross.”

“But you’re not my social worker, not really. All you did was find Gloria for me. Time will tell how that works out.”

“You don’t like Gloria?”

“It’s not about liking. I’m just not sure her self-interest aligns with mine. And forced to choose, who do you think she’ll pick?”

“Her client’s. Gloria is odd, I grant you, and she loves publicity for herself. But she’ll do things your way. As long as you’re not lying to her.”

Again the tapping motion, two fingers against her lips. It reminded Kay of the way young children once played Indian, making war whoops with their hands by beating a similar tattoo on the mouth. She wondered if children still did that, or if heightened sensitivity had meant the end of such games. Certain cultural icons did disappear. Alley Oop, for example, cavemen dragging their women around by the hair, and who could really feel nostalgia for that? Did Andy Capp and Flo still go at it in the comics? She hadn’t glanced at the comics page in years.

“C’mon, Kay. There’s got to be a solution.”

“Perhaps if I took Felix to our house?”

“No, this place is suffused with cat hair and dander. But what if you and the kids came here and I took your house?”

The very reasonableness with which Heather made this proposal floored Kay. She did not see it as an imposition, much less as odd. Kay was careful about throwing around clinical terms, but there was a shading of narcissism in Heather. Then again, perhaps that had been essential to her survival.

“No, Seth and Grace would not be agreeable to that. Like most kids, they’re creatures of routine. But-” She knew she was walking a fine line. Hell, she was crossing a thick one, agreeing to a breach that could get her in a lot of trouble at work. Still, she plunged ahead. “We have a small room, over our garage. Not heated, and not air-conditioned, but that shouldn’t be an issue this time of year, not with a space heater. It was set up as an office, but there’s a couch, a small bath with a shower. Perhaps you could stay there, at least until your mother arrives.”

It wouldn’t be more than a day or two, Kay reasoned. And she wasn’t Heather’s caseworker, not officially. This would be nothing more than a favor to Gloria. Besides, she couldn’t allow the police to lock Heather up. Jail would be devastating for a woman who’d spent much of her youth imprisoned.

“Do you think she’s rich?” Heather asked.

“What?”

“My mother. We never were, quite the opposite. But he said she’s living in Mexico -that seems kind of rich. Maybe I’m an heiress. I always wondered what happened to my dad’s business and the house, after he died. Sometimes I’d read those legal listings. You know, unclaimed bank accounts and safe-deposit boxes? But I never found one in my name. I guess he couldn’t put me in his will, with everyone thinking I was dead and all. I don’t know what happened to our college funds, not that there was that much in them.”

Kay felt the dampness of the stone seeping into her skirt, yet her palms were strangely hot and sweaty.

“And now she’s coming back, you say. I’m going to call Gloria, see what she thinks about all this. Maybe I should go in voluntarily tomorrow, give them the whole story after all. By then, they’ll be ready to believe me, I bet.”

CHAPTER 21

Babies floated across the computer screen. No, not babies plural-just one baby, the baby, the only baby that mattered in the new millennium. Move over, Jesus, Kevin thought, Andrew Porter Jr. has come to town . And his now computer-savvy mother had fed endless images of him into the computer, so when it went into rest mode, the little Andy slide show began. Andy as a tiny infant, cradled by his impossibly huge father. Andy eating, Andy with a picture book, Andy squinting at a Christmas tree. His father’s genes were stamped all over the boy’s face and bulky body, but Kevin liked to think he saw Nancy Porter’s sweet skepticism in that squint. You’re saying there’s this guy, and he brings me presents? What’s in it for him? And what the hell does the tree have to do with any of it ?

“ Pennsylvania records are fucked,” Nancy said, moving her cursor so Andy disappeared and her computer opened on an archived Web page. “Or else I don’t get how they work. In Maryland all I need is the address and the county, and I can research a property going back years. I haven’t been able to find an equivalent page in Pennsylvania, though. The only hit I got on the address you gave me showed it was owned by an LLC, which sold the property a few years back.”

“An LLC?”

“Limited liability corporation, somebody’s small business. Mercer Inc. Could have been anything, from a produce stand to a cleaning service. But there’s no Mercer in our personnel records, so it must be the previous owner we want.”

Fair and pleasantly plump before motherhood, Nancy liked to say she was frankly fat now, but the issue of her weight didn’t seem to bother her as much. When she returned to work, she’d asked for the transfer to cold cases, a request that Infante had secretly disdained. It seemed dreary stuff to him, poring over old files and looking for lucky breaks-the witness who was finally ready to tell the truth after all these years, the spouse who was tired of keeping secrets. He could see why a new mom would want a job that guaranteed regular hours, but he wasn’t sure he considered it real police work. Nancy, however, had a knack for computers and an unerring sense for finding information without ever leaving her desk. The Goddess of Small Things, as Lenhardt had once dubbed her, she now tracked down the tiniest bits of data the way she’d once been able to spot a bullet casing at a hundred paces. She wasn’t used to being stymied, but the old Keystone State ’s record-keeping had thrown her for a loop.

“Probably a wild-goose chase,” Infante said as Nancy clicked to the map, showing him the location. “But I’ll go up there, see what gives, canvass neighbors.”

“Thirty years ago. Twenty-four, if she left in 1981 the way she claimed. Does anyone live in the same place that long, anymore?”

“We just need one. Preferably one nosy old busybody with a razor-sharp memory and a photo album.”

KEVIN HEADED NORTH, marveling at the steady stream of southbound traffic at midday. Lenhardt lived out this way, and he complained constantly about the drain of commuting. He spoke of it as a kind of war, a battle waged daily. So why do it? Infante asked when he tired of the bitching. He got the usual answers: kids, schools, problems that an unencumbered guy didn’t know from.

He almost had, though. There’d been a scare, with his first wife. Or so they’d framed the incident in hindsight, when it became apparent that she wasn’t pregnant. A scare, a danger averted. He hadn’t really felt that way at the time, although he had cause to think of it that way later, when the marriage broke up. He’d been a little hopeful, actually, trying on the role of daddy in his head and feeling it fit pretty well. It was Tabitha who had been worried, fretting over her new job at the mortgage broker’s office, wondering what this would do to her plans to do real-estate closings. So they called it a scare, and she became more vigilant about protection. Then she just stopped having sex with him, and he started cheating on her. Which came first had been the chicken-or-the-egg debate at the center of their divorce. The thing that galled Infante was that even when Tabby conceded he was telling the truth, that he hadn’t fucked around until she stopped fucking, she refused to grant him cause and effect.

“You have to fight for a marriage!” she screamed at him. “You should have talked to me directly, or asked for counseling, or thought about what might make me feel…like a woman again.” He’d never been sure about the last part, but he thought it had something to do with foot rubbing, maybe bubble baths and impromptu gifts. “I’m fighting for it now,” he had screamed back. “I’m talking to you. I’m sitting here in counseling, which isn’t covered under health insurance, by the way.”

But it was over, her decision. Everywhere he went, it was the same story with divorce: The women were the ones who really wanted it. True, there were assholes, guys who cared for no one’s feelings, who dumped their wives for new models. Yet in Infante’s experience, these out-and-out jerks were few and far between. Most of the divorced guys he knew were people like himself, guys who made mistakes but had every intention of staying married. Lenhardt, whose second marriage had made him a bit sanctimonious in the family-happiness department, liked to say that a request for counseling was the first sign that your wife was ready to leave you. “Relationships are chess for women,” he said. “They can see the whole board, plan way ahead. They’re the queens, after all. We’re the kings, limited to one square in any direction, on defense for the whole fucking game.”

Infante and his second wife, Patty, hadn’t even bothered with counseling. They had gone straight to the mattresses, hiring lawyers they couldn’t afford, going into debt over bragging rights to their paltry possessions. Again he had been grateful there were no kids. No student of the Bible-no student of anything-Patty would have carved a kid up even before Solomon offered. Only instead of making a top-to-toe cut, she would have done it at the waist and given Infante the lower half, the one that shit and pissed. And the thing was, he’d known. He had stood there in the church-because Patty, while married twice before, was big on celebrating herself-and realized it was a huge mistake. Watching her come down the aisle had been like seeing a truck bear down on him.

The sex had been great, though.

Interstate 83 went to shit the second he crossed into Pennsylvania and the speed limit dropped ten miles. Still, he could see why some Baltimore workers chose to live up here, a good forty miles out, and not just because the taxes were lower. It was pretty in that rolling-fields, amber-waves-of-grain kind of way. He took the first exit and, using the instructions that Nancy had printed out from the Internet, followed a winding road west, then turned northeast. A McDonald’s, a Kmart, a Wal-Mart-the area was pretty built up. His tires seemed to hum with worry. What were the odds that forty acres had gone undisturbed in the midst of all this development?

Exactly nil. Although he was clearly in the 13350 block, he drove a few miles past Glen Rock Estates before he doubled back, in hopes that he was wrong. No, the address was now a development, one promising an “exclusive community of executive-style homes on generous lots.” In this case “generous” appeared to be defined as between one and two acres, and these “exclusive” homes were two or three years old, judging by the spindly trees and slightly raw landscaping. As for executives-the cars in the driveways spoke more to middle-management types, Subarus and Camrys and Jeep Cherokees. In a truly rich development, there would be a Lexus or two, maybe a Mercedes. Rich people didn’t have to move this far out to have family rooms and two-car garages.

As for orchards? Long gone. Assuming they had ever been there.

“Isn’t that convenient?” he said aloud to himself, using the intonation from the old Saturday Night Live bit. She had been pretty persuasive in her panic about returning here, but now he wondered if she simply didn’t want to go to the trouble of acting out her dismay all over again. He wrote down the name of the company that had developed the property. He would check with local police to see if there’d been any bones discovered during the excavation, get Nancy to cross-check it on a Nexis search. Baltimore County and York County might lie next to each other, but it was all too plausible that bones found here wouldn’t be matched to any Maryland case, much less a thirty-year-old one involving two missing girls. Again, it wasn’t like there was a national database, Bones-R-Us, where you typed in some info and all the missing-persons cases popped up, yours for the asking.

He dialed Nancy ’s cell.

“Anything?” she asked. “Because I’ve got-”

“The property’s been developed. But I had an idea. Could you check York County for-I don’t know how you would phrase it-something like ‘ York County ’ and ‘bones,’ plug in the street name. If there was a grave, it should have been disturbed when they prepared the lots, right?”

“Oh, you mean a Boolean search.”

“Boo-yah what?”

“Never mind. I know what you want. Now, here’s what I got, sitting comfy at my desk.”

Infante thought it would be ungallant to mention what else Nancy was getting, sitting comfy at her desk. Her ass was a lot wider these days. “Yeah?”

“I managed to find the property records. The deed was transferred to Mercer Inc. in 1978, but the previous resident was Stan Dunham. And Dunham was in fact a county police, a sergeant in robbery. Retired in 1974.”

A former cop at the time of the girls’ disappearance, then, but that distinction wouldn’t have been meaningful to a child. Still, it would be slightly easier for the department to stomach. Slightly.

“Is he still alive?”

“In a manner of speaking. His pension checks go to an address out in Carroll County, around Sykesville. It’s an assisted-living community. Based on what the people out there told me, he’s more assisted than living.”

“What’s that mean?”

“He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s three years ago. He barely knows who he is, day in and day out. No living relatives, according to the hospital, no one to contact when he goes, but he’s got a power of attorney on record.”

“Name?”

“Raymond Hertzbach. And he’s up in York, so you might as well try him out before you head back. Sorry.”

“Hey, I like getting out of the office. I didn’t become a police so I could sit at a desk all day.”

“Neither did I. But things change.”

She sounded just a little bit smug, which wasn’t Nancy ’s way at all. Maybe she had picked up the unvoiced observation about what her work habits were doing to her butt. Fair enough, then.

THE HIGHWAY ACTUALLY got worse around York, and Kevin was glad that he wasn’t subjecting his personal vehicle to the ruts and potholes of Pennsylvania. The lawyer, Hertzbach, appeared very much the big fish in a small pond, the kind of attorney who had a billboard on the interstate and a converted Victorian for his office. Puffy and shiny, he wore a pink shirt and a flowery pink tie, which went nicely with his pink face.

“Stan Dunham came to me about the time he sold the property.”

“When was that?”

“Five years ago, I think.”

The new owner must have flipped the property fast, probably gotten even more money for it.

“It was a windfall for him, but he had the foresight to realize that he needed to be prepared for the long term. His wife had died-I was under the impression that he wouldn’t have sold the land while she was alive-and he told me that he had no children, no heirs. He purchased several insurance products that I recommended-long-term care, a couple of annuities. Those were handled through someone else here in town, Donald Leonard, friend of mine through Rotary.”

And you got a nice kickback , Infante thought.

“Did Dunham ask for any advice on criminal matters?”

Hertzbach found this amusing. “If he did, you know I couldn’t comment on it. Confidentiality.”

“But it’s my understanding that he’s now not competent-”

“Yes, he’s deteriorated badly.”

“And if he dies, there’s no one to notify? No next of kin, no friends?”

“Not to my knowledge. But a woman did call me recently, curious about his finances.”

Infante’s brain almost sang like a teakettle at that detail-a woman, interested in money. “Did she give you a name?”

“I’m sure she did, but I’d have to get my secretary to go over the log, pinpoint the date and the name. She was…rather coarse. She wanted to know who was named in his will, if anyone, and how much money he had. Of course, I couldn’t have told her that. I asked her what her relationship was to Mr. Dunham, and she hung up on me. I wondered if it was someone from the nursing home itself, who might have tried to inveigle her way into his good graces, back when he was still alert. Given the timing.”

“The timing?”

“Mr. Dunham was moved to hospice care in February, which means the facility doesn’t expect him to live more than six months.”

“He’s dying from the dementia? Is that possible?”

“Lung cancer, and he quit smoking when he was forty. I have to say, he’s one of the more spectacularly unlucky men I’ve ever met. Sells his land for a tidy sum, then his health fails him. There’s a lesson in that.”

“What would that be, exactly?”

Kevin wasn’t trying to be a smart-ass, but Hertzbach appeared to be struck dumb by the question. “Why, to…I don’t know, take advantage of every day,” he said at last. “Live life to the fullest.”

Thanks for the insight, pal.

He left the office, bumping and bouncing back to the Maryland line, wondering at the coincidence of that telephone call from a woman who, according to the secretary’s logs, had identified herself as the ohso-creative Jane Jones. That call had come in on March 1, not even three weeks earlier. A strange woman, asking questions about an old cop’s money. Did she know he was dying? How? Had she been thinking of bringing a civil action against the man? She had to know there was no statute of limitations for her sister’s murder.

But also no money in a criminal case.

Again he was struck by how convenient it all was-the old farm, gone, and who knows what had happened to the alleged gravesite? The old man, as good as gone.

As he crossed into Maryland, he fumbled for his cell phone and dialed Willoughby, to ask him if he had ever heard of Dunham, although Lenhardt had been out in the country less than a decade. No answer. He decided to hit Nancy again, see what she had learned.

“Infante,” she said. He was still getting used to the fact that phone calls no longer involved any mystery, that his name popped up on Nancy ’s screen, identifying him instantly.

“The lawyer had some interesting nuggets, but Dunham’s pretty much a dead end at this point. Are you now the leading expert on all things Bethany?”

“Getting there. Managed to find the mom-her old real-estate firm, in Austin, knew how to get in touch with her. No answer and no machine, but Lenhardt’s going to keep trying her. Here’s the big find, though-”

“We should keep her away, until we know for sure.”

“Yeah, but, Infante-”

“I mean, she’s going to want to believe, so we have to control for that. And we don’t want to waste her time if we can discredit her.”

“Infante-”

“At the very least, she has to understand that this is not guaranteed, that-”

“Infante, shut up and listen for a second. I took a flier, plugged Penelope Jackson’s name into the Nexis newspaper database on a hunch. You didn’t do that, right?”

Shit. He hated it when Nancy one-upped him this way. “I did the criminal searches, things like that. And Google, but there were hundreds of hits. The name’s too common. Besides, why would I care if she made news some other way?”

“She popped up in an article in some Georgia newspaper”-a pause as Nancy clicked away, looking for what she had stored-“the Brunswick Times. Christmas of last year. A man was killed in a fire Christmas Eve, ruled an accident by investigators. His girlfriend, home at the time, was named Penelope Jackson.”

“Could be a coincidence.”

“Could be,” Nancy agreed, her smugness apparent even over the unstable cell phone line. “But the man who was killed? His name was Tony Dunham.”

“Guy’s lawyer said he had no heirs, even five years ago.”

“And cops down there were told-by the girlfriend-that there was no next of kin to notify, that Tony’s parents were dead. Yet the age works-he was fifty-three when he died, and his Social Security number begins with twenty-one, which indicates it was issued in Maryland. The Dunhams probably lived in Maryland before they moved to Pennsylvania.”

“But thirty years ago, he was twenty-three. He might not even have been living at home then.” And now dead, dead in an accident. Why did everything dead-end with this case, this woman? That family she sideswiped was lucky to be in as good shape as they were, given her track record. “Hell, he could have been drafted for all we know. You check military records?”

“Not yet,” she admitted, and that gave him a small buzz of satisfaction, petty as it was. I thought of a record you didn’t.

“Where’s Brunswick anyway? How do you get there?”

“Sergeant has you booked on a Southwest flight into Jacksonville, leaving at seven. Brunswick is about an hour north. Penelope Jackson worked at a restaurant, Mullet Bay, in some nearby resort called St. Simons Island, but she quit about a month ago. She might still be in the area, though, but no longer at the same address.”

Or she might be in Baltimore, playing some creepy con on them all.

CHAPTER 22

“You sure you’ll be fine?”

“Sure,” she said, thinking, Go, go, please go. “I could even take care of Seth, if he doesn’t want to go.”

“Great,” the boy began, even as Kay said, “No, no, I wouldn’t dream of imposing on you like that.”

Wouldn’t risk it, you mean. But that’s okay, Kay. I wouldn’t leave a child with me, either. I only offered so you wouldn’t find me suspect.

“It is okay if I stay in your house, though, watch television?”

She could tell that Kay didn’t want to offer her that much hospitality. Kay didn’t trust her, and she was right not to trust her, although she couldn’t know that. There was a brief inward struggle, but Kay’s sense of fairness ultimately won out. Oh, she loved Kay, who could always be trusted to do the kind thing, the right thing. It would be nice, to be like Kay, but kindness and fairness were luxuries she couldn’t afford.

“Of course. And help yourself to anything-”

“After that wonderful dinner?” She patted her stomach. “I couldn’t possibly eat another bite.”

“Only someone who had been in the hospital for two days could consider Wung Fu’s wonderful.”

“My family went there for Chinese food. Oh, I know it’s not the same place or family. But I remembered it when we drove over there.”

A skeptical look from Kay. Was she laying it on too thick, trying too hard? But it was true, this part was true. Perhaps she had gotten to the point where her lies were more believable than her truths. Was that the consequence of living a lie for so long?

“Duck sauce,” she said, conscious not to speak too brightly, too rapidly. “I thought it came from a duck the way that milk comes from a cow. I used to think that if we got to the park over in Woodlawn, the one near the Gwynns Falls, early enough in the morning, I would see Chinese people milking the ducks. I imagined them in those straw hats-oh, Lord, we called them coolie hats, I’m afraid. God, we were racists then.”

“Why?” asked Seth. She liked him, him and Grace, too, almost in spite of herself. She despised most children, resented them in fact. But there was a sweetness about Kay’s kids, a kindness inherited or learned from their mother. They were solicitous of Kay, too, perhaps a byproduct of the divorce.

“We didn’t know better. And thirty years from now you’ll probably be saying the same thing to someone else young, who can’t believe the things you said and did and wore and thought.”

She could tell from Seth’s expression that he wasn’t persuaded, but he was too polite to contradict her. His generation was going to get it right, be perfect in every way, unlock every mystery. After all, they had iPods. It seemed to make them think that anything was possible, that they would be able to control life the way they controlled and managed their music, flipping around on a little track wheel. Right, sweetie. It was just one big playlist waiting to be designed, the brave new world of Tivo. What you wanted, when you wanted, all the time.

“We shouldn’t be more than an hour,” Kay said.

“Don’t worry about me.” Or, as Uncle used to say, “Don’t go away mad, just go.”

Left alone in the house, she turned on the television in the den and forced herself to sit through some amazingly stupid program for ten minutes. Kids always forgot something, she figured, but after you’d been in the car for ten minutes, the item would have to be critical for a parent to turn back. When the program went into its second commercial break, she turned on the family computer. No passwords, no passwords, no passwords, she prayed, and of course there weren’t. The poky little Dell was wide open. She would leave tracks, that was unavoidable, but who would think to hunt for them here? Working quickly, she scanned her e-mail via the Web, looking for anything urgent. She then e-mailed her supervisor, explaining that there’d been an accident and a family emergency-true enough, she was her own family-and she’d left town suddenly. She sent it, then immediately quit her e-mail program in case her supervisor was online and fired back a fast reply. Then, although she knew it was risky, she began to type “Heather Bethany” into the Google search engine.

H-e-Two letters in, Google offered her own search back to her. Why, that nosy little Kay. She had been doing quite a bit of extracurricular homework over the past few days. It made her feel better somehow, knowing that Kay wasn’t quite so noble and helpful, that she was capable of base curiosity. She scanned the history, curious to see where Kay’s searches had taken her, but it was all the obvious places, the basic ones. Kay had gone into the Beacon-Light archives but balked at paying the fees. No matter; she had those stories practically memorized. There was the missing-children site, with those eerie aged photographs, the basic facts. And a really creepy blog maintained by some man in Ohio, purporting to have solved the Bethany case. O-kay.

How she wished that Kay, as a social worker, had access to some secret government files, where confidential details were stored. But of course no such place existed, and if it had, she would have found it on her own and hacked her way into it. She had exhausted the available computer resources ages ago.

Reluctantly, she disconnected from the Internet and turned the screen back off. She missed her computer. Until this moment she had never pondered her relationship with it, never acknowledged to herself how many hours a day she spent staring into screens. But this bit of self-knowledge, now that she had it, didn’t feel pathetic. Quite the opposite. She liked computers, their logic and tidiness. In the past few years, she had snorted with laughter at all the concern over the Internet, how it could be used to gain access to underage girls and boys, how it increased the reach of child pornography, as if the world had been so safe before computers came along. If her missteps had started with an IM conversation, her parents would have had a chance of catching it. Instead she had been out in the world, talking to somebody one-on-one, and that’s where the trouble all began, with a simple conversation, the most innocent conversation that anyone could imagine.

Do you like this song?

What?

Do you like this song?

Yes . She didn’t, really. It wasn’t at all the kind of song she liked, but the conversation-the conversation was something else, something she hoped would never end. Yes, I do.

CHAPTER 23

And, finally, the phone rang.

That’s how Miriam would remember the moment. She started creating the memory even as it was happening to her, revising the present in the present. Later she would tell herself that she sensed the momentousness of the call in the dull, flat ring itself, which came as she was setting the table for a supper. But it was really a few seconds later, after a man cleared his throat and began to speak in those strange Baltimore vowel sounds, odd and jarring and yet familiar to her ear after all these years, that she knew.

They had found them.

They had found bodies, and it might be them.

Another lunatic had started babbling in jail, desperate for a deal, or just attention.

They had found them.

Bodies found, them be might it.

Lunatic in jail babbling long shot but hear him out have to.

Them found had they.

Sunny. Heather. Dave dead, poor dead Dave, not here for the end of the story. Or was he lucky Dave, spared from hearing a truth that he could never quite admit to himself?

They had found them.

“Miriam Bethany?” It was the “ Bethany ” that gave it away. There was only one context in which she remained Miriam Bethany.

“Yes?”

“My name is Harold Lenhardt, and I’m a sergeant with the Baltimore County Police Department.”

Found them, found them, found them.

“A few days ago, a woman was in a car accident, and when police came to the scene, she said-”

Lunatic, lunatic, another fucking lunatic. Another crazy, indifferent to the pain and hurt she was causing.

“That she’s your daughter. The younger one, Heather. She says she’s your daughter.”

And Miriam’s mind exploded.