What The Dead Know

CHAPTER 27

Brunswick, Georgia, smelled. At first Infante tried to chalk it up to his own imagination, his reflexive dislike for the deep-fried South-with-a-capital-S. Baltimore had been enough of a culture shock when he moved there in his early twenties, although he had gotten used to it, even come to prefer it. A police could live on his salary and overtime in Baltimore, unlike Long Island. Maybe money went further still down here, but he couldn’t see making that transition. There was no getting around it, Brunswick flat-out stank.

The waitress at the Waffle House must have seen the way his nose was puckered when he came in from outside.

“Pehpermeal,” she said in a low tone, as if offering the password to a secret club.

“Pepper mill?” He was really having a hard time understanding the people down here, despite how slowly they spoke.

“Peh. Per. Meal,” she repeated. “That’s what you smell. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it fast.”

“I’m not going to have time to get used to anything here.” He gave her his best smile. He loved women who brought him food. Even when they were plain and unattractive, like this dumpy, pockmarked girl, he loved them.

It had been almost ten when he got into Brunswick the night before, too dark and too late to visit the neighborhood where Penelope Jackson and her boyfriend had lived. But he’d cruised the block this morning, on his way to this meeting with the local fire inspector. Reynolds Street, at least the particular block where Tony Dunham had lived and died, looked kind of scrappy. It was on its way either up or down. Then again, much of Brunswick looked that way to Kevin, as if it were sliding into despair or picking itself back up after a long slump. Not for me, he thought, regarding the town from the bubble of the Chevy Charisma that Alamo Rent-a-Car had provided. But when he got closer to the water and felt the soft, sweet breeze and remembered how spring had yet to get started up in Baltimore, he began to get the point. There was a gentleness to the weather here, and the people, too. He respected it-in the weather.

“Oh, it was assuredly an accident,” said the inspector from the local fire department, a man named Wayne Tolliver, who met Infante for a cup of coffee at the end of his breakfast, just as Infante had timed it. He didn’t like to conduct business while eating, and he was glad that he had given himself wholeheartedly to this particular meal, a satisfying spread of eggs, sausage, and grits. “She was in the front room, watching television, and he was in the bedroom, smoking and drinking. He fell asleep, knocked the ashtray on a little rug next to the bed, and the place”-he threw his hands open, as if tossing an invisible wad of confetti-“went up.”

“What did she do?”

“The smoke alarms weren’t working.” Tolliver made a face. He was a round-faced man, pink-cheeked and kind-looking, probably not as old as his freckled bald head made him look. “People think we’re overly concerned, telling them to change batteries when they change their clocks every six months, but it’s better’n never . Anyway, it was Christmas Eve, cold for these parts, and she had a space heater going where she was. The TV was in an old Florida room, didn’t have any central heating. By the time she noticed the smoke, it was too late. She told us she went to the door but felt it first, like you’re supposed to, and saw it was hot to the touch. She said she banged on it, screamed his name, then called 911. Windows were nailed shut-a violation on the landlord’s part, to be sure, but the fellow probably never had a fighting chance, drunk as he was. My guess is that he was dead from smoke inhalation, or on his way there, before she even realized what was going on.”

“And that was that.”

Tolliver picked up the judgment in Infante’s voice. “No accelerants. Only one point of origin, the rug. We looked at her. We looked at her real close. Here’s the thing that sold me-she didn’t take nary a thing out of that room. It went up with all her clothes, whatever jewelry she owned, and it’s not like he had any money to leave her. Quite the opposite. He had an annuity that stopped with his death, so she lost whatever income he provided.”

“An annuity?” The lawyer up in York had said that Stan Dunham purchased one after selling the farm, so that fit. But he also said the man didn’t have any living relatives.

“A policy that paid him a monthly sum, for up to ten years. You know when ballplayers get those big salaries? They’re underwritten by annuities. Bigger ones than this, of course. It wasn’t a lot-judging by their lifestyle, it was just enough to get the two of them fucked up, regular. They were partyers, those two. You think they’d have grown out of that behavior, at their ages-he was in his fifties-but some people never do.”

There was a whiff of sorrow in that statement, as if Tolliver had some personal experience on this front, a loved one who had never grown up and caused him some heartache. But Infante wasn’t here to talk about Tolliver.

“What else did you learn about the two of them?”

“It was a…familiar address to our brothers in blue. Noise complaints. Suspected domestic violence, but those calls came from the neighbors, not from her, and they said they were never sure who was getting the worst of it. She was a hellcat, one of those hillbilly gals out of the hollows of North Carolina.”

Everything was relative. If this guy was calling someone a hillbilly, she must have been really low-rent-rope belt, Daisy Dukes, the full Elly May Clampett.

“How long had she lived at the Reynolds Street address?”

“Not sure. She didn’t appear on any of the official documents-the lease, the utility bills. That was all in his name. He’d been there five years or so. He drove trucks, but not regular for any one company. The way the neighbors tell it, he met her on the road and brought her back. He wasn’t much, but he always managed to have a woman around. She was the third one, the neighbors.”

“Did you do a tox screen on him?”

Another insulted look. “Yes. And it was consistent with being dead drunk, with an Ambien behind it, and nothing more. Guy was like a lot of truckers-he relied on pills to stay awake, to make his days, and then he needed help to calm down when he was home. He had just come back from a job the day before.”

“Still…”

“Look, I get where you’re trying to go with this. But I know fires. Allow me that much? An upended ashtray on a cheap cotton rug. If she’da set that fire, do you know how calculating she’d have to be, how calm? Oh, it’s easy enough to throw a lit cigarette on the rug, but she’s got to be sure he won’t wake up, right? She has to stand there, watch the fire get under way, wait until it’s the inferno that she’s going to call in. If it doesn’t catch, she can’t throw another one down, because we’ll pick up on that. Right? She’s got to hope the neighbors don’t see anything-”

“It was Christmas Eve. How many were home?”

Tolliver steamed past that. “I’ve met the woman. She didn’t have the wiles to pull that off. Firefighters had to hold her back from going into the house.”

But she had the presence of mind not to go into the bedroom when the door was hot to the touch.

Again Tolliver picked up on what Infante didn’t say. “People can be real calm and composed in an emergency. Self-protection kicks in. She saved herself, but when she realized he was in there, that he was really gone, she went crazy. I’ve listened to the 911 call. She was scared.” Skeered. And people made fun of Infante’s alleged New York accent, which was actually pretty mild, a shadow of the real thing.

“Where is she now?”

“I don’t know. House is condemned, so she’s not living there. Could be in town, could have left. She can do what she pleases. She’s free, white, and twenty-one.”

If Infante had ever heard that phrase in his life, it would have been in a movie or a television show, and not a recent one. Said in today’s workplace, this was the kind of careless sentiment that resulted in meetings with human-resources facilitators. Yet Tolliver didn’t seem to realize that the comment was off in any way. And, to be fair, Infante’s own father and uncles had let loose with far worse, much more consciously.

Leaving the Waffle House, he wondered what had brought Tony Dunham south, why he’d ended up making his home here. The weather could be reason enough. And as a long-haul trucker, it wasn’t like the guy was burning with ambition. Born in the early 1950s, Dunham would have been just old enough that college was still optional. Even a high school dropout could make a living back in the sixties, if he got in with a good union. Nancy ’s record check indicated that Tony Dunham wasn’t a veteran, but it wasn’t clear if he’d been living at home during the years that the alleged Heather Bethany claimed to live there. She hadn’t mentioned anyone else in the house. Then again, she hadn’t provided much beyond the address and Stan Dunham’s name. Had she wanted them to find the link to Tony or not? And where did Penelope Jackson fit into this?

Photos didn’t lie: The woman in Baltimore wasn’t Penelope, not the Penelope in the driver’s-license photo. But who was she? What if Penelope was Heather Bethany and this woman had stolen her life story along with her car? Then where was Penelope? He could only hope that folks on Reynolds Street might recognize his mystery woman, be able to explain her relationship to these people.

SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY WAS notably lacking when Infante returned to Reynolds Street and began asking questions about Penelope Jackson and Tony Dunham. Granted, the first man he encountered may have wanted to be helpful, but he spoke more Spanish than English, and the mere sight of Infante’s official ID shut him down. Still, he nodded at the photocopy of Penelope Jackson’s North Carolina driver’s license, saying, “Sí, sí, is Miss Penelope,” then shrugged at the photo of the other woman, showing no sign of recognition. The neighbor to the east, a heavyset black woman who seemed to have five or six children, sighed as if to suggest that she had seen so much that she didn’t have time to see anything else. “I minded my business and they minded theirs,” she said when asked if she knew where Penelope Jackson might be.

On the other side of the charred blue house, an older man was pulling a bamboo rake over the yellow-green lawn, loosening winter debris. Cold and curt at first, he became friendlier when he realized he was dealing with someone official.

“I hate to say it, but I’d rather have the place a burnt-out shell than have those two back,” said the man, Aaron Parrish. “Unkind of me-and I wouldn’t have wished such a tragedy on them. But they were awful people. Oh, the fights and the yelling. Plus-” He lowered his voice as if about to speak of something truly shameful. “Plus, he parked his pickup on the front lawn. I complained to the landlord, but he said they kept up on their rent, unlike the Mexicans. But I find the Mexicans to be better neighbors, once you explain a few things about America to them.”

“Fights, yelling-between the two of them?”

“Frequently.”

“Did you call the cops?”

A nervous look around, as if someone might be listening. “Anonymously. A few times. My wife even tried to talk to Penelope about it, but she said it was none of our business, only she didn’t say it quite so nicely .”

“This her?”

Parrish peered at the driver’s-license photo, enlarged and printed out by Nancy. “Appears so. Although she was prettier in person. Petite, but with a lovely figure, like a little doll.”

“This woman look familiar?” He had a photo of quote-Heather Bethany-unquote, taken with a digital camera during their second interview.

“No, never seen her. My, they look a little bit alike, don’t they?”

Did they? Infante looked at the two photos, but he saw only the most superficial resemblance-hair, eyes, maybe build. Much as he disliked and disbelieved Heather Bethany, he saw a frailty there that Penelope Jackson didn’t have. Jackson looked like one tough customer.

“Did she tell you anything about herself? Penelope Jackson, I mean. Where she was from? Where Tony was from? How they met?”

“She wasn’t one who was inclined to chat. I know she worked over on St. Simons, at a place called Mullet Bay. Tony did work on the island, too, sometimes, when he couldn’t find long-haul work. He picked up jobs with a landscaping service. But of course they couldn’t live there.”

“Why not?”

Aaron Parrish laughed at Infante’s naïveté. “Prices, son. Almost none of the folks who work on the island can afford to live there. This house”-he waved at the charred remains of the three-bedroom rancher with blue siding-“that would be a quarter of a million, as is, if you could just pick it up and airlift it five miles east. St. Simons is for millionaires, Sea Island dearer still.”

Infante thanked Mr. Parrish and let himself into the unlocked house, which still held the smell of the fire. He didn’t see why the structure had to be condemned; the damage had been largely contained to the bedroom. The landlord probably stood to make more money on the insurance claim that way.

The door to the bedroom was swollen and stuck, but he managed to open it by throwing his full weight behind his shoulder. Tolliver had said that Tony Dunham had been dead before he burned, killed by smoke inhalation, but it was hard to forget that his flesh had sizzled and popped like barbecue for a time. That smell remained, too. Infante stood in the doorway, trying to imagine it. You would have to have some big balls to try killing someone this way-tossing the ashtray on the rug, waiting for the fire to engage. As Tolliver said, you couldn’t throw a second cigarette down if it didn’t get going. And if the guy woke up, you’d better be able to persuade him that it was an accident and you just walked in, a nervy chance to take if he was already smacking you regular. You also needed the discipline not to reach for a single cherished possession, to let it all go. You had to stand there until you were almost choking from the smoke, then close the door, wash your face to clear it of the watery tears caused by the fire, then go back and wait until you were sure that no one could save the man on the other side.

The woman up in Baltimore, whatever her name was-she could do that, he was sure of it. But he also was convinced that she wasn’t Penelope Jackson. It was the only real fact he had. I don’t know Penelope Jackson, she had said. But wouldn’t a true stranger have modified the name? I don’t know a Penelope Jackson, I don’t know any Penelope Jackson. Then how the fuck did you come to have her car? She had managed to avoid answering that question by offering them the solution to an infamous crime, then setting up a police officer as the perp. She had thrown a lot of things at them-to what end? What didn’t she want them to see?

He left the house, left Reynolds Street. It was a sad house, even before the fire. A house where two unhappy people had coexisted with frustration and disappointment. A house of quarrels and insults. He could tell because he had lived in such a house, twice. Well-once, his second marriage. His first marriage had been okay, until it wasn’t. Tabby had been a sweet girl. If he met her now…But he could never meet her again, not the Tabby he had first glimpsed in the Wharf Rat twelve years ago. She was lost to him, replaced by a woman who knew Kevin Infante as a cheat and a runaround. He ran into Tabby sometimes- Baltimore was small that way-and she was always polite, civil, as was he. Friendly, even, laughing about their marriage as if it were nothing more than an accident-plagued road trip, a merry misadventure. A decade out, they could be generous to their younger selves.

Yet there was a film in her eyes that would never quite disappear, a sheen of disappointment. He would give anything to see Tabby one more time as she had regarded him that first night in the Wharf Rat, when he was still someone she could admire and respect.

ONE OF THE PAMPHLETS from the Best Western lobby said there was some sort of fort over on St. Simons Island, and he decided to kill time there until Mullet Bay, the restaurant-bar where Penelope Jackson had worked, began prepping for the dinner rush. He was used to historical disappointments-he had seen the Alamo when he was just ten years old-but there was no structure at all where Fort Frederica once stood. He was staring at a sea of weeds known as the Bloody Marsh when his cell rang.

“Hey, Nancy.”

“Hey, Infante.” He knew that tone. He was more attuned to Nancy ’s tones than he had been to either wife’s. She was going to drop some bad news on him.

“Out with it, Nancy.”

“Our gal has decided she wants to talk. Today.”

“I’m back tonight. Can’t it wait?”

“I thought so, but Lenhardt says we gotta humor her. He’s going to send me in there with her. I think he’s worried about media, once her mom gets here. No one expected her to get out of Mexico so fast, with so little notice, and…well, we can’t control the mom as easily. We’ve got no charge hanging over her head. She can talk to whoever she wants to.”

Free, white, and twenty-one , as Tolliver might say.

“Yeah, it could be a clusterfuck.” It was amazing that they had flown beneath the radar as long as they had, their only bit of luck. “Fuck, though. When does the mom get in?”

“ Ten P.M., right behind you. That’s another thing…”

“Aw, c’mon. I’ve got to pick her up? Did I get demoted in the last twenty-four hours?”

“Sarge thought it would be nice if someone met her, and we don’t know how long this thing will go. Nice and…well, prudent. We want to keep her in our sights, you know?”

“Yeah.”

Infante snapped his phone shut in disgust and returned to staring at the marsh. The battle hadn’t apparently been all that bloody. British troops had repelled a Spanish invasion during something called the War of Jenkins’ Ear. What a small-stakes name for a war, but then he was fighting his own meaningless battle, wasn’t he, wandering around Georgia while his former partner vaulted into the lead position, conducted an interview that should have been his. The War of Infante’s Left Testicle. It was worse, in a way, knowing that Nancy hadn’t backstabbed him or maneuvered this. She had never been the scheming type. He wondered if maybe-Heather knew he had gone to Georgia and that’s why she was suddenly keen to tell all.

Fuck, he hated Brunswick.

CHAPTER 28

“The thing is, we could really use your help.”

Willoughby heard the words, made sense of them, yet couldn’t quite process his way to an answer. He was too taken with the speaker, enthralled and delighted by her mere presence. An old-fashioned girl. Willoughby knew he was being sexist, but he couldn’t help thinking of the young detective that way. She was so curvy, a nineteenth-century body type here in the early days of the twenty-first, with such pretty red cheeks and slippery blond hair falling out of a careless topknot. There had been women in the department when he was there. By the late 1980s, some had even made homicide. But they sure hadn’t looked like this one.

“I was up until almost four A.M.,” the detective, Nancy, was saying earnestly, “going over what’s filtered out about the case and what was kept in the file. But it’s so much to take in at once, I thought you could help me focus on the key details.”

She pushed two printouts toward him. Not just typed but color-coded, red and blue. Red for what was known publicly, blue for what had been kept back. It seemed a little girly to him, but maybe all police did such things now that they had computers. Certainly he would never have dared using a system like this in his day, given how his coworkers were always on the alert for any sign of weakness or softness in him. Effeteness was the precise word, but if he had ever uttered it aloud, his colleagues would have seized upon it as evidence that he was, in fact, effete.

“ Four A.M.?” he murmured. “And here it is only noon. You must be exhausted.”

“I have a six-month-old son. Exhausted is my natural state. Actually, I got four straight hours, so I feel relatively well rested.”

Willoughby pretended to study the papers in front of him, but he didn’t want to focus, didn’t want to surrender to those red and blue sirens. There was a whirlpool beneath this placid assortment of old facts. He had no desire to get sucked into this again, to think about all the ways he had failed. Not that anyone had ever rebuked him or suggested he was at fault in any way. His superiors, much as they had wanted a resolution in the Bethany matter-and that was the word they had come to use over time, matter-understood that it was bad luck, one of those rare cases that could have come straight from The Twilight Zone. Not even Dave, in the end, had faulted him. And by the time Willoughby left the department, he had in many ways carved out the image he’d wanted. One of the guys. Tough. Dogged. Never soft, much less effete.

Yet it had long gnawed at him that he’d never made significant inroads into learning what happened to the Bethany girls. And now here was this young woman-gosh, she was pretty, and a new mother, too, imagine that-telling him that a police had been accused, one of their own. One of his own, practically a contemporary. He didn’t remember Stan Dunham, and this Nancy girl said he had retired from the theft division in 1974, but still: This would be so embarrassing. He knew how it would look, if the Jane Doe girl-the woman-was telling the truth. Right under their own noses, all these years. There might be suggestions of a cover-up, a conspiracy. People loved conspiracies.

“This,” he said, pointing his finger at a line in blue ink, a line that had been capitalized and highlighted. “You got it. This is what you want. Only a very few people could talk about this in any detail-me, Miriam, Dave, the young cop who was with us that night, whoever had access to the evidence room.”

“That’s not a small number of people. Plus, the accused is a police, someone who might have had sources inside the department.”

“You’re thinking she’s not who she says she is, but that Stan still might be involved.”

“Everything’s in play right now. Information, it’s-” She paused, gathering her thoughts. “It’s alive, in its own way. It grows, it changes. Since I started working cold cases and spending more and more time with case files and computers, I think about information differently. It’s like a Lego set, you know? There are different ways to put it together, but some pieces will never join, no matter how you pound on them.”

The tea on the table between them had grown cold, but he took a sip anyway. He had insisted on making the tea, injecting a lot of ceremony into two mugs and two bags of Lipton, and she had indulged him in his wish, probably thinking he was lonely and wanted to draw out the visit. He wasn’t lonely, far from it, and he didn’t want her to stay one minute longer than necessary. His eyes slid toward his wife’s old desk and he heard a bird’s mournful coo somewhere in the eaves of Edenwald. Too late. Too late.

“The thing about this,” Willoughby said, “is that the person who took the girls doesn’t necessarily know about it and almost certainly doesn’t remember it. It wouldn’t have mattered to him. But a girl-a girl would remember it. You would, wouldn’t you? At that age?”

“Well, I was more of a tomboy, as you might guess, but yeah, I would remember.”

“So work your way to that. Get her good and drunk on her own words. That’s all you need to do. But you know that, right? You say you were in homicide, before your maternity leave.” He found himself blushing, as if it were impolite to remind this woman that she had bodily functions, that she had reproduced. “You know your way around an interrogation. In fact, I bet you’re darn good at it.”

It was her turn to drink cold tea, to stall a little. When he was younger, he might not have been drawn to her. In his twenties he had liked the women of his class, as his own snobbish mother might have said, the thin-to-the-point-of-brittle women, Katharine Hepburn types, with those pelvis-forward walks and hips that could cut you. Evelyn had been such a woman, elegant at every angle. But softness had its virtues, and this Nancy Porter had such a doll-like face, with those red cheeks and pale blue eyes. Peasant stock, his mother would have said, but his family tree could have used some sturdier genes.

“We thought-they thought-Sergeant Lenhardt, who supervises Infante, and the commissioner himself-we thought you should be present.”

“Watching, you mean?”

“Maybe even…talking.”

“Is that legal?”

“Sometimes retired police still work for the department. Sort of a noncommissioned, consultancy gig. We could make that happen.”

“Dear-”

“ Nancy .”

“I wasn’t being a sexist-I lost your name for a second and was trying to cover up. That’s how it works, don’t you see? I’m in my sixties. I forget things. I’m not as sharp as I was. I don’t remember every detail. Right now you know this case better than I do. I have nothing to contribute.”

“Just your presence might make her think twice about trying to fake us out. With Infante in Georgia and the mother due to arrive tonight-”

“Miriam is coming? You found Miriam?”

“In Mexico, just as you said. She kept a bank account in Texas, and we got the contact info from them. Lenhardt found her last night, but we never thought she’d get here so fast. He tried to talk her out of coming at all. She’ll have to travel all day, but once she’s here, I don’t see how we can keep her away. It wasn’t our idea to sit down today, but my boss says it may be an opportunity, after all.”

“You mean, if she’s a fake, she may fool Miriam and begin gleaning information from her, almost without her knowing.” He shook his head. “She won’t fool Miriam. No one could fool Miriam about anything.”

“We’re not too worried about that. If it comes to it, we’ll always have epithelial cells. But if we could eliminate her definitively, trip her up on the facts, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.”

“Epi…?”

“DNA. I’m just being fancy using a scientific term, and not even accurately.”

“DNA. Of course. The policeman’s new best friend.” He took another sip of cold tea. So Miriam hadn’t told them, and they hadn’t asked. She assumed and they assumed, and why wouldn’t they? Things had gone unsaid, inferences had been made. His fault, he supposed, and he had considered undoing it so many times over the years. But he had owed Dave that much.

He pushed the papers away with enough force that some skidded off the slick surface of his mahogany coffee table. A table that, he noticed now, in the presence of this vibrant young woman, was dusty and overwaxed.

“You can’t imagine being through with something like this, can you? You think the juices can always be engaged. The old cliché is that warhorses react when they smell smoke. But does that mean the horse wants to go to war or that he wants to avoid it? I’ve always thought it might be the latter. I did some good work as a detective. When I retired, I made peace with the fact that this one case would remain open, that some things cannot be known. I even-don’t laugh-thought about supernatural explanations. Alien abductions. Why not?”

“But if there are answers to be had…”

“In my gut I feel that this is going to prove to be a hoax, an ugly waste of everyone’s time and energy. I grieve for Miriam, flying back here, being forced to contemplate the one thing she seldom allowed herself to believe. Dave was the one who clung to hope, and it killed him. It was Miriam who could accept reality, who found a way to survive and get on with her life, diminished as it was.”

“Your gut-that’s what we need. In the room with me, making eye contact with her. The commissioner says he’ll talk to you further about this, if it will make a difference.”

Willoughby walked to the window. It was overcast and cool, even by March’s temperamental standards. Still, he could play golf if he wanted to. Golf, the game one never perfects, the game that reminds you every time how human you are, how flawed. He had always said he would never play, never be drawn into the country-club life that was practically his birthright, but in the empty days of retirement he had fallen into it, and now he was stuck. He’d been forty-five when he retired. Who retires at forty-five?

A failure.

He hadn’t meant to be a career police. The plan, long ago, had been to go into police work for a mere five years or so, then switch to the state’s attorney’s office, run for attorney general as the candidate who knew the law at every level, maybe even take a run at governor one day. As a young man, fresh out of UVA law school, he had plotted his future with that kind of confidence-five-year plans, ten-year plans, twenty-year plans. Then he became a murder police at age thirty and decided to stay a little longer, maybe work a famous case or two to boost his profile. Within that first year, he caught the Bethany case. He stayed another five years, then another ten.

It wasn’t only because of the Bethany case, not exactly. But justice seemed less and less important to him. The courtroom wasn’t a place for answers. It was the world of epilogues, a stage setting where the players assembled the exact same facts, fitting them together-how had this young woman put it? Yes, like Legos. Here’s my version, here’s his version. Which appeals to you the most? Legos. There were an infinite number of ways to put them together. He thought of the downtown library at Christmastime, where the windows were filled with magnificent Lego constructions made by local architectural firms. He thought about how carelessly he had assumed he would walk his own children, then grandchildren, past those windows. But his wife couldn’t have children, as it turned out. “You can adopt,” Dave had told him, and Willoughby had said unthinkingly, “But you never know what you’re going to get.”

Dave, to his credit, had said only, “No one ever does, Chet.” The debt to Dave weighed on him still, and it was not paid, it would never be paid. His one effort to repay it had resulted in this debacle-Miriam on a plane, the detectives assuming that science was on their side, that when all else failed they would get a subpoena and prove she was a liar, via her blood or her teeth-or her mother’s DNA. Yes, it would be better for everyone if this woman’s story could be debunked before Miriam arrived tonight.

“I’ll accompany you,” he said at last. “I won’t go in, but I’ll watch and listen, and you can consult me as you need to. But I’ll need some lunch, and then you better get some caffeine into me. This is going to be a long afternoon, and I’m used to enjoying a nice postprandial nap.”

He knew he was giving her something to ridicule, with that postprandial bit. She would probably repeat that around the department later. “He couldn’t say ‘after lunch’ like a normal person-he had to say ‘postprandial.’” But that had always been part of his police persona. He had deliberately allowed other police to take the piss out of him every now and then, to give them reasons to mock his grandiosity, his manners.

Their hostility to him, their suspicion of his motives in being a police, had always puzzled him. The best detectives loved what they did and were proud of it. They, too, could make more money doing other things, but they had chosen police work. Chet was simply doing the same thing, and his love was purer still. Yet they never got that. In the end they just couldn’t trust the guy who didn’t need the paycheck. This red-cheeked girl was no different. Right now she required his help, or thought she did. But when it was all over, she’d mock him behind his back. So be it. He would do this for Dave-and Miriam.

He wondered how she had aged, how much gray was in her dark hair, if Mexico had weathered that lovely olive skin.

CHAPTER 29

The blankness of her passport reminded Miriam how immobile she had been for the last sixteen years, barely moving out of San Miguel, much less traveling beyond Mexico ’s borders. She hadn’t, in fact, flown since long before 9/11, but she wasn’t sure she would have noted the changes if she had not been primed to look for them. Customs in Dallas-Fort Worth had probably never been a particularly pleasant experience in the most hopeful of times. She wasn’t surprised at how rudely she was treated, or how they peered at her, then the photo on the passport, which was due to expire in a year. She had become a U.S. citizen in 1963 because it simplified everything. Contrary to what people thought, citizenship wasn’t conferred automatically upon marriage. If it hadn’t been for the girls, she might never have changed her citizenship. Even in 1963 she had a sense that she wasn’t meant to be an “American,” as residents of the United States so blithely called themselves, as if no other country in the hemisphere existed. But she took on that identity for her family’s sake.

“What’s the nature of your visit in the United States?” the immigration agent asked in a rapid monotone. She was black, forty-something, and so bored by her job that it seemed an enormous effort for her to rest her considerable bulk on the high, padded stool afforded her in the little booth.

“Uh…” It was only a split second of hesitation, but it seemed to be the excitement the immigration official had been longing for, the off-kilter answer that her ears were trained to pick up. Suddenly the woman’s spine was straight, her eyes sharp.

“What’s the nature of your visit?” she repeated, her voice now inflected. Vi-sit.

“Why, I-” Miriam remembered just in time that she was not required to tell the story of her life, standing here in immigration. She did not have to tell this woman that her children had been missing and presumed murdered for thirty years, much less that now, against all hope, one of them might be alive. She did not have to tell her about the affair with Baumgarten, the divorce, the move to Texas, the move to Mexico, Dave’s death. She did not have to explain why she became a U.S. citizen, or why she had reverted to her maiden name after the divorce, or even why she had chosen to settle in San Miguel de Allende. Her life belonged to her still, at least for now. That could change, in the next twenty-four hours, and she could become public property once again.

All she had to say was, “Personal. A family matter. A relative was in a car accident.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “That’s awful.”

“It’s not serious,” Miriam assured her, gathering her bags and moving on to the domestic terminal, where she had a numbing four hours to kill before the flight to Baltimore.

“IT’S NOT SERIOUS,” the sergeant had told her the evening before, when she had recovered from the shock. Like someone thrown into deep, cold water, Miriam had been disoriented and stunned, her instincts overwhelmed. It had taken several moments for her to center herself, to do the natural thing and head for the surface, to break through to the place where she could breathe again. “The car accident, I mean,” the man clarified. “Obviously, the claims she’s making are very serious.”

“I’ll have to fly all day, but I could be back there by tomorrow night if I leave first thing,” she said. She was weeping, but it was the kind of crying that didn’t impede her voice, her thoughts. Her mind was flipping through her contacts in San Miguel, people who could and would do her favors. There was one particularly good hotel where the management was used to catering to rich types, with their sudden whims. They could probably book her ticket. Money was no object.

“It really would be better if you waited…We’re not sure, in fact-”

“No, no, I could never wait.” Then she got it. “You think she might be a liar?”

“We think she’s damn odd, but she knows some things that only someone with intimate knowledge of the case could have, and we are developing some new leads, but it’s all very tentative.”

“So even if she’s not my daughter, she almost certainly knows something about her. And what of Sunny? What has she said about her sister?”

A pause, the kind of grave pause that told her the man on the other end of the phone was a parent. “She was killed soon after they were taken. According to this woman.”

In sixteen-plus years of living in Mexico, Miriam had never once suffered a stomach ailment. But at that moment she felt the sharp, stabbing gut pain that was the hallmark of turista. Of all the things she had allowed herself to imagine for thirty years-the discovery of a grave, an arrest, the end of the story and yes, in some secret chamber of her heart, the impossible possibility of reunion-this had never occurred to her. One, but not the other? She felt as if her body might break down under the strain of trying to harbor such polarized feelings. Heather, alive, and the promise of answers after so many years. Sunny, dead, and the horror of answers after so many years. She glanced at her expression in the tin-framed mirror over the primitive pine buffet, expecting to see it bifurcated, the mask of comedy and tragedy combined in one face. But she looked as she usually did.

“I’ll be there. As soon as humanly possible.”

“That’s your choice, of course. But you might want to let us check out a few of these leads. I’ve got a detective in Georgia, working on something. I’d hate for you to come all this way-”

“Look, there are only two possibilities. One is that this is my daughter, in which case I cannot get there soon enough. The other is that this is someone who knows something about my daughter and is exploiting the knowledge for whatever reason. If that’s so, I want to confront her. Besides, I’ll know. The moment I see her, I’ll know.”

“Still, a day won’t change much, and if we should discredit her…” He didn’t want her to come, for whatever reason, not yet, which only strengthened Miriam’s resolve to be there as soon as possible. Dave was dead, she was in charge. She would behave as he would, if he were still around. She owed him that much.

Now, not even twenty-four hours later, wheeling her luggage past the hideous shops in the airport, Miriam was rethinking her certitude. What if she didn’t know? What if her desire to see her daughter alive tainted her maternal instinct? What if maternal instinct was bullshit? There had always been those eager to disavow Miriam’s motherhood, people who unthinkingly and unfeelingly demoted her because she had no biological claim on the children she was raising. What if they were right and Miriam was missing some key sense? Did the very fact that she had bonded so thoroughly with children who were not her biological kin prove how suggestive she was by nature? She remembered a cat they had owned, a superb calico mouser. Spayed, the cat had never thrown a litter. But one day she had discovered a little stuffed seal of Heather’s, a repulsive thing made of actual seal fur, a gift from Dave’s clueless mother. If the seal hadn’t come from his mother, Dave never would have allowed Heather to keep it; he had made Miriam get rid of her beaver coat, a remnant of her Canadian life, passed down from her grandmother, and far more defensible. But all sorts of exceptions were made for Florence Bethany. The cat, Eleanor, discovered the seal and adopted it, dragging it around by the neck as she might have carried her own kitten, endlessly washing it, hissing at anyone who tried to take it from her. Eventually, of course, she ruined it, her wet, rough tongue removing all the hair until it was something truly hideous, a fetal bit of canvas.

What if Miriam’s instincts were on a par with the calico mouser’s? Having learned to love another woman’s children as her own, was she capable of claiming any child, if she wanted to believe badly enough? Was she going to grab a stuffed seal by the neck and pretend it was her kitten?

In the year before she disappeared, Sunny had asked more and more questions about her “real” mother. She had been a typical adolescent at the time, so moody and temperamental that the family called her Stormy, and she kept tiptoeing up to the edge of the story, then retreating. She wanted to know. She wasn’t ready to know. “Was it a one-car accident?” she asked. “What caused it? Who was driving?” The sweet, polite stories they had told for so long were now lies, plain and simple, and neither Miriam nor Dave knew how to navigate that change. Lying was the greatest sin in a teenager’s eyes, the only excuse needed to reject all parental rules and strictures. If they had armed Sunny with the evidence of their deceit and hypocrisy, she would have been impossible. But, eventually, she would have to know, if only because there was an object lesson in her mother’s mistakes, a reminder of how fatal it can be not to confide in a parent, to be proud in the wake of a mistake. If Sally Turner had been able to go to her parents in her time of need, then Sunny and Heather might never have come to be the Bethany girls. And as much as Miriam hated that idea, she knew that it would have been for the best. Not because of biology but because if the girls’ mother had lived, they might have lived, too.

The police had looked long and hard into the father’s family, but his few remaining relatives seemed to neither know nor care what had happened to that violent young man’s offspring. He was an orphan, and the aunt who raised him had disapproved of Sally as much as Estelle and Herb had disapproved of him. Leonard, or Leo. Something like that. It was impossible to single out any indignity in the aftermath of the girls’ disappearance, but Miriam had disliked the keen interest in the girls’ parentage even more than the probing into her licentiousness. And Dave, who usually wanted every avenue explored, even the most crackpot theories, had been driven insane by that line of inquiry. “They are our daughters,” he said to Chet repeatedly. “This has nothing to do with the Turners, or that idiot who did nothing more than a stray dog might have done. You’re wasting your time.” He was almost hysterical on the subject.

Once, years earlier, someone-a friend until this incident, which revealed that the person was not a friend and had never been one-had asked Miriam if the children could be Dave’s, biologically, if he had impregnated the Turners’ daughter during some long, clandestine affair and they had all conspired to concoct this elaborate story when she died, from whatever cause. Miriam had gotten used to the fact that no one would ever see a likeness between her and the girls, but she found it strange that this woman thought she could see Dave in them. Yes, his hair was light, but bushy and curly. Yes, his skin was fair, but his eyes were brown, his frame completely different. Yet, time and time again, people had said, Oh, the girls favor their father, which created a moment beyond awkward, for Miriam did not want to be put in the position of disavowing the girls in their hearing, but nor could she bear for the misinformation to stand. They are like me, she wanted to say. They are so like me. They are my daughters, and I have shaped them. They will be better versions of me, strong and more self-aware, capable of getting what they want without feeling selfish or greedy, the way women of my generation did.

Four hours. Four hours to kill in an airport and then almost three hours for the flight itself, and she had already been traveling for almost eight hours-up at 6:00 A.M. for the car, arranged by Joe, that took her to the local airport, then a long delay in Mexico City. There were good books in the airport bookstore, but she could not imagine focusing on any of them, and the magazines seemed too trivial, too outside her existence. She didn’t even know who most of the actresses were, living as she did without a satellite dish. In face and figure, they looked shockingly alike to Miriam, as indistinguishable from one another as Madame Alexander dolls. The headlines screamed of personal matters-engagements, divorces, births. Give Chet credit, she thought. He had kept so much from local media. How docile reporters had been, how circumspect. Now the whole story would come out-the adoption, her affair, their money woes. Everything.

It still might, Miriam realized. It still might. Today’s world would never allow this reunion, if it proved to be that, remain private. It was almost enough to make her hope that the woman in Baltimore was a liar. But she couldn’t sustain the wish. She would give up everything-the truth about herself, ugly and unpleasant as it was, the truth about Dave and how she had treated him-she would trade it all, without a second thought, to see one of her daughters again.

She scooped up an armful of tabloids, deciding to think of them as homework, the future text of her life.

CHAPTER 30

“Do you think this will finish it?” Heather asked, staring out the car window. She had been humming under her breath since they got in the car, a hum that had risen to a high-pitched drone when Kay took the entrance to the Beltway. It wasn’t clear to Kay if she was aware of what she was doing.

“Finish it?”

“Will it be over, once I tell them everything?”

Kay was never glib, even about the smallest matters, and this question struck her as particularly grave. Will it be over? Gloria hadn’t bothered to provide that information when she called and asked Kay-told her, really, issuing orders as if Kay worked for her, as if she were the one who’d been doing all the favors and Kay was in her debt-to bring Heather to the Public Safety Building by 4:00 P.M. And now they were running late because Heather had fussed so over her clothes. She’d been as petulant as Grace dressing for school, and almost as impossible to satisfy. Ultimately, she settled on a pale blue button-down and a stretchy tweed skirt, which worked, in spite of itself, with her clunky black shoes, the only items of her own wardrobe that she was still willing to wear. All this bother seemed funny to Kay, because Heather didn’t give off the vibe of someone who thought about her appearance. A shame, really, because she was such a striking woman, blessed with things that only nature could bestow-high cheekbones, the kind of willowy frame that age never thickened, good skin.

“Nothing’s changed with the boy, if that’s what you mean. His condition’s improving steadily. Gloria seems confident there won’t be serious charges in connection with the collision.”

“I wasn’t really thinking about him.”

“Oh.” It bothered Kay, how seldom Heather thought of anyone but herself. But that would be the logical consequence of what had happened-assuming that Kay’s theories were right. Working from the scant details that Heather had meted out so far, Kay had decided that Stan Dunham had taken both girls but killed Sunny because, at fifteen, she was too old to interest him. He had kept Heather until she, too, ceased to be of use to a pedophile, then retained her for a few extra years until Heather was sufficiently traumatized to keep his secrets. How? Kay didn’t want to think about that. Clearly, he had turned her into his accomplice somehow, made her feel as if she were a criminal, too. Or simply left her so racked with fear that she would never consider telling anyone what had happened. Kay was not troubled, as the detectives seemed to be, by the fact that Heather had not tried to get away or tell anyone what was happening to her during those six or so years. Perhaps he told her that her parents were dead, or even that they’d arranged for him to take the girls. Children were so suggestible, so malleable. Even Heather’s continuing reluctance to tell the full story was logical to Kay. Her new identity, whatever it was, had been central to her survival. Why should she entrust anyone with it-particularly men and women who had worked in the same department as her abductor?

“Do you think they know anything new?” Heather asked.

“New?”

“Maybe they found my sister’s body. I told them where it was.”

“Even if they did-and I think that might have made the news, since it would be hard to excavate an old grave without drawing attention to it-it would take weeks to identify her remains.”

“Really? Wouldn’t this be a high-priority case, something they could rush through?” She seemed a little insulted not to be given the treatment she thought was her due.

“Only on television.” Through her work with the House of Ruth, the same channels in which she’d become acquainted with Gloria, Kay had gotten to know a forensic anthropologist from College Park, who was a rueful guide to the pedestrian restraints, mainly budgetary, that kept her from producing the miracles the public expected. “There are some things they can tell right away-”

“Like what?”

Kay realized she wasn’t sure. “Well, certain…um, damage to the body. Blunt-force trauma or gunshot. But also the gender, I think, the approximate age.”

“How do they do that?”

“I don’t know exactly. But, obviously, skeletons change in puberty. However, if your old dentist is still around, he’ll be able to ID your sister pretty quickly. I understand that dentists are very good at recognizing their own work.”

“John Martielli, D.D.S.,” Heather said, her voice almost dreamy. “His office was upstairs, above the drugstore. There were Highlights magazines, of course. Goofus and Gallant. If we didn’t have cavities-and we never had cavities-we were allowed to go around the corner and buy whatever we liked from the bakery, no matter how much white sugar it had in it.”

“You’ve never had a cavity?” Kay thought of her own poor, tortured mouth. Just this year she’d undergone the tedium of having every silver filling replaced, and now there were crowns aging out, the result of cracked teeth that Kay considered the legacy of her divorce. She had ground her teeth until two sheared off, the bits coming up with the granola bar she was eating at the time. The crowns had led to an infection and a root canal, and the dentist thought she might need additional surgery still. She knew that her dental woes weren’t her fault, but the problems in her mouth made her feel vaguely unclean, unhygienic.

“No. Even when I didn’t go to the dentist for years-because I didn’t have health insurance in my twenties-my teeth were perfect. Now I go every six months.” She bared her teeth, showing them off. Good teeth, great bone structure, a naturally slender frame, lovely skin-if Kay hadn’t known Heather’s story, she would have hated her a little.

“Could we stop?” Heather asked, holding her stomach as if she had a cramp.

“We’re running late as it is, but if you’re carsick or need something to eat-”

“I thought we could go to the mall.”

“The mall?”

“ Security Square?” Kay glanced at Heather. It was hard to make eye contact while driving, especially when one was trying to merge onto the Beltway, but she had learned from dealing with Grace that eye contact was overrated. She got more information out of her daughter when they were staring straight ahead, through the same windshield. The mall was one exit past where Heather had been picked up Tuesday night. “Is that where you were trying to go, all along?”

“Not consciously. But maybe I was. At any rate, I need to go there now, before I do this. Please, Kay? It’s not the worst thing in the world, being late.”

“I’m not as worried about the detectives as I am about Gloria. She doesn’t value anyone’s time but her own.”

“I’ll call her on your cell, explain we’re running behind.” Without waiting for Kay’s agreement, Heather grabbed the phone from the cup holder between the seats and used its received-calls log to find Gloria’s number and call her back. She manipulated the phone with ease, as comfortable with gadgetry as Seth or Grace. “Gloria? It’s Heather. We’re just getting on the road. Kay’s ex-husband was late picking up the kids, and we couldn’t very well leave them there, could we?” She didn’t give Gloria time to reply. “See you in a few.”

What a brilliant excuse , Kay thought. She pinned it on someone that no one knows, that no one would think to question.

It took a split second, but the larger implications of this observation seemed to vibrate beneath her tires as she merged onto the long, sweeping exit to Security Boulevard.

“I THOUGHT THINGS got smaller as you aged,” Heather said. “This seems larger. Did they expand it?”

They were standing in a corridor where, according to Heather, the movie theater, all two screens, had once been. For a Saturday the mall was severely underpopulated, and while it had some of the usual offerings-Old Navy, a chain music store, a Sears, and a Hecht’s-the other stores were unknown to Kay, and there was a general sense of abandonment. In one corner a former department store-Hoschild’s, Heather insisted-had been deconstructed, its walls torn away so that only its escalators remained. These now took shoppers to an Asian food court. There must be a big Asian population in the area, for the name Seoul Plaza had been affixed to the facade of the mall’s south end. Kay found the Seoul Plaza part vaguely hopeful, a sign of how things changed and adapted. It was exciting, on one level, that this section of Baltimore County needed such a specialty store. But she wasn’t much of a fan of malls in particular, and this one was so forlorn, so seedy and forgotten.

She wondered what it looked like to Heather.

“You could smell the Karmelkorn even here,” Heather was saying now. “It filled this central area. That’s where we were supposed to meet that day.”

Heather began to walk, head down, as if there were clues to follow. Upon reaching the mall’s atrium, she turned right. “The organ store was up here, near the bookstore. The sewing supplies-Singer, not Jo-Ann-were the other way, along with Harmony Hut. We were supposed to meet our father at the health food store, the GNC, at five-thirty. He bought brewer’s yeast there, and sesame candy. It was pretty here then. Full of people, festive.”

It was as if Heather were prepping, reviewing information for a test. But if she was Heather Bethany, why would she worry about having the right answers? And if she wasn’t, she must see that the mall was so changed that no one could check her memories of it, contradict her recollections?

“Mall security,” she said, stopping to inspect a glassed-in booth with uniformed men staring at a variety of screens, and Kay wondered if she was thinking that such men might have saved her, thirty years ago. “This is where Karmelkorn-No, no, no. I’m turned around. The new wing, with Hecht’s, threw me off. It’s not that the mall has gotten larger but that I was confused about the layout, transposed the two corridors.”

She began moving so fast that Kay almost had to jog to keep up with her. “The movie theaters would have been down here,” she said, skidding to a stop, then turning around, her pace picking right back up. “And if we go right here-yes, now it makes sense. The place where those escalators are, that wasn’t Hoschild’s but the J. C. Penney, which was still under construction that weekend. Here-this was the organ store, where Mr. Pincharelli worked on weekends.”

“Here” was now something called Kid-Go-Round, a store that apparently catered to children who needed the equivalent of prom clothes, for weddings and the like. Next door was a store called Touch of the Past, which Kay found eerie until she realized that it sold Negro League memorabilia, expensive jerseys for teams such as the Homestead Grays and the Atlanta Black Crackers.

“Mr. Pincharelli?” Kay asked.

“The music teacher at Rock Glen Junior High. Sunny had the biggest crush on him for a while.”

Heather stood transfixed, rocking slightly, humming again as she had in the car, hugging herself as if she were cold. “Look at those dresses,” she said. “Flower girls, junior attendants. Did you have that kind of wedding?”

“Not quite,” Kay said, smiling at the memory. “We married outdoors, in the backyard of a friend’s house on the Severn River, and I wore flowers in my hair. It was the eighties,” she added with a note of apology. “And I was all of twenty-three.”

“I’m never going to marry, not for real.” Heather’s tone was not regretful or self-pitying, merely factual.

“Well, then at least you’ll never have to get divorced,” Kay said.

“My parents divorced, didn’t they? I didn’t get that at first. They split up. Do you think it’s my fault?”

“Your fault?”

“Well, not my fault, obviously. But a consequence of what…happened. Do you think grief drove them apart?”

“I think,” Kay said, picking her words with as much precision as possible, “that grief, tragedy, tends to magnify whatever is there, expose the fissures that are already there. Strong marriages get stronger. Weak ones suffer and, without help, may fall apart. In my experience.”

“Are you saying my parents didn’t have a good marriage before?” Her tone was fierce, straight from the schoolyard, the instinctive defense against even an implied insult against one’s parents.

“I wouldn’t know. I couldn’t know. I was speaking in generalities, Heather.”

Again the smile, the reward for using her name, for being the one who believed in her, perhaps even more than Gloria, whose dedication was billed hourly. “I thought everyone was dead. I just assumed everyone was dead. Except me.”

Kay trained her eyes on the gossamer skirts in the windows, the heartbreaking kind of girly-girl dresses that her own Grace had never wanted to wear. I just assumed everyone was dead. If they were, it would be much easier to carry the lie. But would someone tell a lie like this just to get out of being charged in a traffic accident? If that were the case, now that she knew the little boy was going to be okay, couldn’t she simply recant? She was so credible, yet the very fact that Kay was thinking along those lines might be the proof of how studied this all was.

Staring straight ahead, Kay could see Heather’s reflection in the plate-glass window of where the organ store had once been. Tears were coursing down her face, and she was shaking so hard that her teeth, her perfect, no-cavity teeth, were chattering uncontrollably.

“It began here,” she said. “In its own way, it began here.”

CHAPTER 31

The business section of St. Simons-the “village,” according to a local who helped Kevin find his way there-was lousy with charm.

The main drag was lined with precious shops, the kind that specialized in selling useless things to people who shopped reflexively, as entertainment. It wasn’t the high-end, name-brand type of shopping you saw in the Hamptons, where Kevin had worked landscaping jobs as a teenager, but it was a big step up from Brunswick. He understood now why Penelope Jackson had lived on the mainland, how out-of-reach the real estate must be for the people who scooped the ice cream, poured the beers, sold the pink-and-green dresses that seemed to dominate the window displays.

He had timed his visit to Mullet Bay for the late-afternoon rush, before the dinner hour started in earnest. The bar-restaurant was a typical resort establishment, another variation on the American dream, Jimmy Buffett version. Parrots, tropical drinks, no-worries-mon. It was hard to figure out how a going-on-forty woman had fit in here, a young person’s joint where the waitstaff, male and female, wore shorts and polos. But the manager, a dark-eyed honey of a girl with glowing skin, cleared that up by explaining that Penelope was one of the line cooks.

“She was great,” she said with a peppy enthusiasm that seemed to be her default setting, pronouncing it “graaaa-ate.” The plastic bar pinned above her perfect left tit proclaimed her to be Heather, and the coincidence seemed a portent of…well, something. Then again, Heather was a pretty popular name. “Good worker, very reliable. Would fill in at the last minute, even bartended once or twice when the regular guy didn’t show. The bosses would have dearly loved to keep her.”

“Why’d she quit?”

“Well, she just needed a new start. After the fire and all.” Even in expressing genuine sadness, this Heather retained a kind of indomitable enthusiasm, as if her beauty, her fine young limbs, supplied her with a constant, humming joy of self. Infante imagined arranging those limbs around him, absorbing a little of that sunny self-regard.

“What about this woman?” He pulled out the photo of his would-be Heather. “She look familiar? You ever see anyone like this with Penelope?”

“No. But then-I didn’t really see anyone with her, not even her boyfriend. She spoke of him, and he came by once that I recall, but that was it.” She wrinkled her nose. “Older fellow, kind of sleazy. He said some things to me, but I didn’t tell Penelope. It was just beer talk.”

“She say where she was going when she left?”

“No, not to me. She gave notice, and we even had a little party for her at the end of her last shift. A cake and all. But, you know, she was kind of private. I think-” She hesitated, touchingly sincere in her desire not to gossip, which made Infante like her all the more. So many folks he interviewed reveled in the opportunity to slander others in the name of their civic duty, volunteering all sorts of extraneous and derogatory information.

“Do you think she kept to herself because of her situation at home?”

An energetic, relieved nod. God, he wanted to fuck her. It would be like…like lying on a beach somewhere, only with the silkiest sand imaginable, warm and comforting, not the least bit gritty. There was nothing sour in this girl, no life taint. Her parents were probably still married, even still in love. She was breezing through school, popular with males and females alike. He could imagine birds alighting on her shoulders, as if she were some Disney cartoon princess.

“She came in once, with a bruise on her face? And all I did was look, just glance at her, and she got very upset. ‘You don’t know what’s going on,’ she said. And I told her, ‘I didn’t say anything, Penelope, but if there’s something I can do,’ and she was, like, ‘No, no, no, Heather, you don’t understand, it’s not what you think, it was just an accident.’ And then…then-” The girl swallowed, a little nervous, and Infante fought to keep his attention on her words even as he was trying to figure out how to persuade her to come out to his rental car and climb on top of him. “She said, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll all be worth it. I’ll come out on top.’ That was around Thanksgiving.”

“What did she mean by that?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. We never spoke of it again. Was that…well, wrong of me? Should I have called someone, tried to make her get help? She was an adult, after all, older’n me. I didn’t see how I could help her.”

“You did just fine,” Infante said, seizing the opportunity to pat her forearm. The moment stretched out, not at all awkward.

“Can I get you something? Food, a drink?” Her voice was a little lower, almost husky.

“I probably shouldn’t. I have to drive back to the airport in an hour or so, catch a flight home to Baltimore.”

He caught her stealing a glance at his left hand. “There are lots of flights out of Jacksonville. You could probably go first thing in the morning, and it wouldn’t make much difference. Home at nine, either way, just A.M. or P.M. What’s the diff?”

“I already checked out of my motel.”

“Oh, well, accommodations could be made, most likely. People are real friendly here. And it’s fun, St. Simons. You’ve hardly seen any of it, I bet.”

He considered it. Of course he did. Here was a beautiful young woman, all but promising she would fuck him when her shift ended. He could sit at the bar, drink beer, let the anticipation build as he watched her twitch back and forth in those khaki shorts. She’d probably comp his bar bill, or at least sneak him a few under the table. And what was the difference-the diff-Saturday night versus Sunday morning? Nancy was doing the interview today, starting just about now, by his calculations. He had been cut out, through no fault of his own. Okay, through nobody’s fault, but definitely through no fault of his own. Under the circumstances-and the circumstances were beginning to form in his mind, an accident on the causeway, nothing big, nothing that would make the news, but enough of a hassle to trap him on the island until after the last Baltimore-bound plane left Jacksonville, and who could prove it didn’t happen?-no one would care if Infante came home tomorrow. It wasn’t like you needed to be an exceptional detective to do an airport pickup. Let someone else baby-sit the mom when she arrived, shuttle her to the Sheraton and keep her company. Heck, Lenhardt would probably enjoy hearing about his southern-belle adventure. Did you get a good meal on the department? No, but I got good pussy!

He brushed her wrist with his fingertips, feeling all that warmth, the vitality of her youth, the strength that came from never having had anything really bad happen to you. Kevin had no use for actual virgins, but he liked this particular kind of innocence, born of the belief that some guarantee had been made, that life would always be a smooth, creamy ride. Maybe it would be for this Heather. Maybe everyone she loved would die in his or her sleep, at appropriate ages. Maybe she would never sit at a kitchen table with her husband, weeping over the bills they couldn’t quite cover or arguing about the various disappointments he had banked. Maybe she would have children who brought her nothing but pride and joy. Maybe. Someone had to have a life like that, right? His line of work didn’t specialize in them, but they had to exist.

He slid his hand from her wrist, shook her soft little paw, and said good-bye, taking care to let her know, through his voice and expression, how much he regretted not staying.

“Oh,” she said, surprised, clearly a girl who was used to getting her way.

“Maybe another time,” he said, meaning, Tomorrow, next week, I’ll probably go home with another young woman I meet in a bar. But tonight I’m going to return my rental car and be a team player.

On the way out of town, he stopped at a barbecue joint in Brunswick and bought Lenhardt a T-shirt, a muscle-bound pig modeling his biceps: NO ONE CAN BEAT OUR MEAT. Even with that pit stop for a pulled-pork sandwich, he got to the Jacksonville airport so early that he managed to get standby on a flight that would get him into BWI almost an hour earlier than his original flight, a nonstop that would take almost half the time of his original one.

CHAPTER 32

“You want a better chair?”

“No, no.” Willoughby was embarrassed by the offer, by the sergeant’s very solicitousness. He was neither old enough nor distinguished enough to warrant so much attention.

“Because I can get you something better than that.”

“I’m okay.”

“I mean, over a few hours you’re going to feel that one.”

“Sergeant,” he said, intending to sound dignified and stoic, but achieving only cranky. “Sergeant, I’m fine.”

The building was a different one from the one where he had worked the bulk of his career, and he found himself grateful for that. He had not come here to stroll down memory lane. He was the ref, the linesman, here to rule what was fair or foul. A manila envelope, slightly dusty, sat at his feet, waiting for its moment. It was going on 4:30 P.M., an interesting time to begin a long interview. It was a drowsy time of day, when blood sugar dipped and people began thinking about dinner, maybe cocktails if they went that way. Earlier, Willoughby had watched the pretty detective eat an apple and several slices of cheese, washed down with a bottle of water.

“Protein,” she explained when she realized he was observing her. “It doesn’t give you a burst of energy, but it sustains you over the long haul.”

He wished he had a daughter. A son would have been nice, too, but a daughter cares for her parents in old age, while sons tend to get sucked into their wives’ families, or so he’d always heard. If he had a daughter, he would still have a daughter. And grandchildren. It wasn’t that he was lonely. Until a few days ago, he’d been pretty happy with his life. He had his health, golf, his golf buddies, and if he wanted to keep company with a woman, there were several at Edenwald who’d be thrilled to volunteer. Twice a month he met some old friends, Gilman boys, at the Starbucks on York Road, the one where the old Citgo station had been, and they talked about politics and old times. They called themselves “ROMEO”-retired old men eating out-and the conversation was damn lively. The sad truth was, Evelyn had been so sick and so frail for so long that he couldn’t really miss her. Or, more correctly, he’d been missing her for years, through the last decade of her life, and it was easier to miss her now that she was truly gone.

It was funny about Evelyn-she didn’t like him to talk about the Bethany girls. Other cases, even ones that were far more gruesome in the details, didn’t bother her so much. In fact, she liked how he played it both ways. His life as a cop had brought him real cachet in their social circles, even made him sexier, and Evelyn had reveled in the fact, all her friends jockeying around him, vying for his attention, plying him with questions about his work. But not the Bethany girls, never the Bethany girls. He’d assumed that the subject was too heartbreaking for her. Denied children, she could not bear to hear about another infertile couple who had gained them, almost magically, then saw them taken. Now, for the first time, he wondered if the real problem was that he never solved it. Had Evelyn been disappointed in him?

“YOU’RE LATE,” Gloria snapped at Kay, taking Heather by the elbow.

“Heather told you what happened,” Kay said, trying to convince herself that she wasn’t lying, simply declining to contradict Heather’s lie, another hair split in a growing series of split hairs, a whole headful of them. But when she tried to follow them into the elevator, Gloria stopped her.

“You can’t come up, Kay. Well, you could come up, but you’ll be left in some empty office or conference room.”

“Oh-I knew that,” she said, her second lie in less than a minute, but this one merely a cover for her embarrassment.

“It’s going to be a while, Kay. Hours. I assumed that I would drive Heather home.”

“But it’s so far out of your way. You live up here, and I’m over on the southwest side.”

“Kay…”

She should go home, Kay told herself. She was getting too close to Heather as it was, crossing all sorts of lines. The mere fact that Heather was in her home-well, technically not in her home, but on her property-could result in a reprimand, threats against her license. She was losing her way. But, having gone this far, she was not willing to go back.

“I have a book with me. Jane Eyre. I’ll be utterly content.”

“Jane Eyre, huh? I never could read her.”

Kay realized that Gloria had confused Brontë’s novel with the other Jane of nineteenth-century letters, Jane Austen. There probably wasn’t room for much in Gloria’s brain besides her clients, her work. Should Kay take her aside, tell her that they had visited the old mall? Would Heather volunteer this? Did it matter? Left alone, her eyes scanned blindly across the pages, following but not really absorbing Jane’s flight from Thornfield, the stiff proposal from St. John, the adorable, adoring sisters who turned out to be Jane’s cousins.

SHE WASN’T HAPPY to see a female detective in the room, although she tried to conceal her irritation and surprise.

“Are we waiting for Kevin?” she asked.

“Kevin?” the plump detective echoed. “Oh, Detective Infante.” As if she didn’t have the right to call him by his first name. She doesn’t like me. She resents me for being so much thinner, even though she’s a lot younger. She’s protective of Kevin. “Detective Infante had to go out of town. To Georgia .”

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

Gloria shot her a look, but she was beyond caring what Gloria thought. She knew what she was doing and what she had to do.

“I don’t know. Does it mean something to you?”

“I’ve never lived there, if that’s where you’re going.”

“Where have you lived, over the last thirty years?”

“She’s going to take the Fifth on that,” Gloria said quickly.

“I’m not sure the Fifth is relevant, and we keep telling you that we can get your client before a grand jury, grant her immunity on anything she did as far as identity theft goes, but-okay.” Fake easygoing.

I know you, Detective. You’re one of the good girls, the kind who gets to be class secretary, or maybe vice president. The one who always has a big jock boyfriend and fusses with his collar at lunchtime, already a little wife at age sixteen. I know you. But I know what it’s like to be a real teenage bride, and you wouldn’t like it. You wouldn’t like it at all.

“As we’ve said repeatedly, this isn’t about the legal side of things,” Gloria said. “It’s also the poking about, the prying. If Heather provides the details of her current identity, you’ll start talking to her coworkers and neighbors, right?”

“Possibly. We’ll definitely run it through all our databases.”

Who the fuck cares?

But Gloria said: “You think she’s a criminal?”

“No, no, not at all. We’re just having a hard time understanding why she never came forward until she was involved in a car accident and facing hit-and-run charges.”

She decided to challenge the detective head-on. “You don’t like me.”

“I just met you,” she said. “I don’t know you.”

“When is Kevin coming back? Shouldn’t he do the interview? Without him we’ll have to go over a bunch of stuff I’ve already covered.”

“You were the one who wanted to do this today. Well, here we are. Let’s do it.”

“Gary Gilmore’s final words-1977. Were you even born?”

“That very year,” Nancy Porter said. “And how old were you? Where were you that Gary Gilmore’s death made such an impact on you?”

“I was thirteen in Heather years. I was a different age on the outside.”

“‘Heather years’? You make it sound like dog years.”

“Trust me, Detective-I aspired to the life of a dog.”

CHAPTER 33

5:45 P.M.

“Sunny told me that I could go to the mall with her, but I couldn’t hang around her. And then, maybe just because she said that, I wouldn’t leave her alone. I followed her to the movie Escape to Witch Mountain. When the previews began, she got up and went out. I thought she might have gone to the bathroom, but when the movie started and she still wasn’t back, I went out to the lobby to check for her.”

“Were you worried about her? Did you think something had happened?”

The subject- Willoughby was not ready to call her Heather yet, if only out of self-protection, wary of investing too much hope in this woman, this resolution-the subject thought carefully about the question. Willoughby could see that she was someone given to thinking before she spoke. Perhaps she was simply a cautious person, but his suspicion was that she liked the drama created by her pauses and hesitation. She knew she was playing for a larger audience than Nancy and Gloria.

“It’s interesting that you ask that. The thing is, I did worry about Sunny. I know that sounds backwards, me being the younger one. But she was-I don’t know what the right word is. Naïve? I wouldn’t have had any words for it at the time. I just know I felt protective of her, and it worried me when she didn’t come back. It was unthinkable that she would buy a movie ticket and abandon the show.”

“She could have gone outside and asked for a refund.”

She furrowed her brow, as if considering this. “Yes. Yes. That never occurred to me. I was eleven. And besides, I found out right away why she left. She had sneaked into Chinatown , which was an R-rated movie. The way the lobby was set up-there were only two theaters-it wasn’t so easy to do that, and they watched for it. But if you used the bathroom on the other side-if you said the other one was full, or dirty-you could distract an usher and sneak in. We had done that before, to get two movies for the price of one, but not to see an R movie. It never occurred to me to try to see an R movie. I was a bit of a goody-goody.”

Sneaking into R-rated movies-did kids even have to do that anymore? And a movie such as Chinatown , what a disappointment that must have been if you were hoping for salacious kicks. Willoughby wondered if an eleven-year-old, back in 1975, could even grasp the big twist, the incest theme, much less follow the intricate land deal at the heart of the film.

“So I found her in the back row, watching Chinatown , and she got furious with me, told me to go away. Which attracted the usher’s attention, and we both got thrown out. She was really angry. Angry enough to scare me. Then she said that she was done with me, that she wouldn’t even buy me Karmelkorn as promised, and she didn’t want to see me again until our father picked us up at five-thirty.”

“So what did you do?”

“Walked around. Looked at things.”

“Did you see anyone, speak to anyone?”

“I didn’t speak to anyone, no.”

Willoughby made a notation on the legal pad they had provided him. This was key. If Pincharelli remembered Heather, she should remember him. It was one of the few things the music teacher had been forthcoming about, eventually. He’d seen Heather in the audience, watching him play.

Nancy Porter, bless her, caught it, too.

“You didn’t speak to anyone, okay. But did you see someone, anyone, that you knew?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Didn’t see anyone familiar. A neighbor, a friend of your parents’?”

“No.”

“So you just wandered around the mall, by yourself for three hours…”

“That’s what little girls do at malls, from time immemorial. They go to malls and walk around. Didn’t you, Detective?”

This earned a baleful look from Gloria, who was not enjoying her client’s combative attitude. Detective Porter smiled-a sunny, sincere smile, the kind of smile her subject had probably never been able to deliver in her entire life-and said, “Yeah, but for me it would have been White Marsh, and I hung out in the food court, near Mamma Ilardo’s pizza.”

“Nice name.”

“They made a good pizza.”

Nancy bent over her legal pad, writing furiously. All for show, Willoughby knew. All for show.

6:20 P.M.

“Tell me again what happened at the end of the day, when it was time for you to meet.”

“I told you.”

“Tell me again.” Nancy took a swig from a bottle of water. She had offered the woman repeated chances to have a soda, take a bathroom break, but she always said no. Too bad, because if they could get her prints on a glass, they could run it through the system in minutes, see if they got a hit. Did she know that?

“It was almost five, and I had wandered back to the center, beneath the big green skylight, where the food was. Karmelkorn, Baskin-Robbins. I was thinking that Sunny might change her mind and buy me a treat after all. I decided if she didn’t buy me Karmelkorn, I’d tell our parents about the R-rated movie. One way or another, I would get what I wanted. Back then…back then I was very good at getting my way.”

“Back then?”

“You’d be surprised how years of sexual servitude break your will.”

Willoughby liked the way that the detective nodded, as if sympathetic, but didn’t let this information throw her off her stride. Yeah, yeah, years of sexual servitude, that old thing.

“It’s-what time is it, when you go to the Karmelkorn?”

“Almost five. I told you.”

“How did you know the time?”

“I had a Snoopy watch.” Recited in an oh-so-bored voice. “A yellow-faced watch on a wide leather band. It had belonged to Sunny, in fact, and she no longer wore it. I thought it was funny. But the way his arms moved, it was hard to ever know the exact time. So all I can say is, it was going on five.”

“And where was the Karmelkorn?”

“I couldn’t tell you in terms of north or south, if that’s what you want. Security Square was shaped like a plus sign, only one end was much longer than the other. The Karmelkorn would have been on the short, stumpy end that faced where the J. C. Penney was going in, but hadn’t opened yet. It was a great place to sit. Even if you weren’t eating, the smell was so rich and buttery.”

“So you were sitting?”

“Yes, on the edge of a fountain. It wasn’t a wishing fountain, but people had thrown coins in. I remember wondering what would happen if I fished them out, if I would get in trouble.”

“But you were a goody-goody, you said.”

“Even goody-goodies think about such things. In fact, I would say that’s what defines us. We’re always thinking about the things we don’t dare do, figuring out where the lines are drawn, so we can go right up to the edge of things, then plead innocence on the ground of a technicality.”

“Was Sunny a goody-goody?”

“No, she was something worse.”

“What was that?”

“Someone who wanted to be bad and didn’t know how.”

7:10 P.M.

Jane Eyre finished-Reader, I married him, he was blind, what other choice did he have?-Kay realized she was without a book. She probably had one in the trunk of her car, but she wasn’t sure they would buzz her back into the building if she left. She could ask someone, but she felt that strange adolescent self-consciousness that she had never quite lost. She studied the notices pinned to the bulletin board, the pamphlets. DARE-Drug Awareness Education. No, wait, that didn’t add up: Drug Abuse Resistance Education. An infelicitous name, all to create an acronym that didn’t work, in Kay’s opinion. It was too close to Drug Abuse Resists Education.

The impromptu trip to the mall still bothered her. Should she tell someone? To whom did she owe her loyalty, if anyone? Should she leave? But all that waited for her was an empty house on a Saturday night.

7:35 P.M.

“You want a soda?”

“No.”

“Because I do. I’ll be right back, okay? I’m just going to get a soda. Gloria?”

“I’m fine.”

Left alone, the lawyer said to her client, “They’re listening to us, just so you know. If we want to speak privately, however, all you have to do is ask.”

“I know. I’m fine.”

7:55 P.M.

“So where were we?”

“You were getting a soda.”

“No, I mean when I left. Where were you, in the story? Oh, yeah, on the edge of the fountain, thinking about the coins.”

“A man tapped me on the shoulder-”

“Show me.”

“Show you?”

Nancy perched on the table between them. “I’m you. Did he come up from behind you? Which side? Show me.”

She approached Nancy from behind, flicking her left shoulder with a little more vehemence than a tap would require.

“So you turn and you see this guy-what did he look like?”

“He was just an old guy to me. Very short hair, gray and brown. Ordinary-looking. He was in his fifties, but I’d only find that out later. At the time the only thing I thought was, He’s old.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He asked if I was Heather Bethany. He knew my name.”

“And did that seem strange to you?”

“No. I was a kid. Grown-ups were always knowing things about me that I didn’t know how they knew them. Grown-ups were like gods. Back then.”

“Did you know him?”

“No, but he showed me his badge, right away, told me he was a police officer.”

“What did the badge look like?”

“I don’t know. A badge. He wasn’t wearing a uniform, but he had a badge, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me to doubt anything he said.”

“Which was?”

“‘Your sister’s been hurt. Come with me.’ So I went. I followed him down a corridor, where the restrooms were. There was an exit back there, marked ‘For Emergencies Only,’ but it was an emergency, so it made sense to me that we were going that way, rather than the usual entrances.”

“Did an alarm sound?”

“An alarm?”

“You walk out doors marked Emergency Exit Only, an alarm usually sounds.”

“I don’t remember one. Maybe he disabled it. Maybe there wasn’t one. I don’t know.”

“The corridor was…where?”

“Between the center atrium and Sears. It was where the restrooms were, and also where they did the surveys.”

“Surveys?”

“Consumer stuff. Sunny told me about it. You could get, like, five dollars for answering questions. But you had to be at least fifteen, so I never got to do it.”

8:40 P.M.

Infante slipped into the room where Willoughby and Lenhardt were watching the interrogation.

“You’re supposed to be at the airport, waiting for the mom,” Lenhardt said to him, but not in a mean, ballbusting way, not to Willoughby ’s ears.

“I got in early, and she’s going to be at least two hours late according to the monitors. I thought I had time to run up here, see how things were going.”

“ Nancy ’s doing good,” Lenhardt said. “She’s taking her time. She’s had her going almost four hours now, and she keeps bringing her up to the edge of the actual kidnapping, then going back to the beginning. It’s driving her crazy. She’s bursting to tell us the bad shit, for some reason.”

Infante glanced at his watch. “I’ll have to leave for the airport by nine-thirty. You think I’ll catch the main show?”

Lenhardt balled his fists and rotated his wrists, peering at his clenched fingers. “Magic Eight Ball says all signs look good.”

8:50 P.M.

“So you’re outside, and…is it dark?”

“No, it’s still light. It’s March twenty-ninth. The days were getting longer. We got outside-”

“No alarm on the door?”

“No, no alarm on the door. And there was a van. He opened the door, and Sunny was inside. Before I could register anything-the fact that she was lying down, tied up, the fact that this wasn’t a police car-he had caught me up and thrown me back there. I fought, if you could call it that, a little girl flailing her arms at a grown man. But it was completely ineffectual. I wonder-do you think he got Sunny the same way, with the same story? How did he know us? Have you figured that out, Detective? How did Stan Dunham know us? Why did he target us?”

“Stan Dunham’s in a retirement community out in Sykesville.” A pause. “Did you know that?”

“It’s not as if we’re pen pals.” Said with dry disgust. Yet without worry, Willoughby noticed. Again, they had considered carefully what they would say about Dunham. They had no intention of telling her that he couldn’t contradict his own name at this point. But the fact that he was still alive didn’t seem to make as much of an impression as it should have. Even if she were telling the truth, shouldn’t she be more taken aback by the revelation that her captor, the man who had ruined her life, was just thirty miles west of where she sat?

“Okay, okay-when he grabbed you, did you…lose anything? Leave anything behind?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that. Did you leave anything behind?”

Her eyes widened. “The purse. Of course, I dropped my purse. How I mourned that purse. I know this will sound weird to you, but it was easier, in the back of that van, to worry about the purse than to think about…” She began to cry, and her lawyer handed her a tissue, although these were the kind of tears that no mere tissue could sop up, hard as rain.

“Can you describe the purse?”

“D-d-d-d-escribe it?” It was all Willoughby could do not to reach out and grab the sergeant’s hand. This was it, the moment that he and Nancy had planned this morning.

“Yes, could you describe it? Tell me what it looked like, what was in it?”

She appeared to be thinking, which didn’t seem right to Willoughby. She knew or she didn’t.

The lawyer spoke for the first time. “C’mon, Nancy. What does it matter if she can describe a purse she had when she was eleven?”

“She described her Snoopy watch in pretty definite detail.”

“It was thirty years ago. People do forget things. I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday-”

“Denim with red rickrack,” she said firmly, her voice rising over her lawyer’s. “Attached to a set of wooden handles by a set of white buttons. The purse had a muslin base, and you could attach various covers to change the look.”

“And what was in it?”

“Why…money, of course. And a little comb.”

“Not a key or a lipstick?”

“Sunny had the key, and I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup yet, just Bonne Belle.”

“That was the complete inventory of the purse?”

“What?”

“A little comb, Bonne Belle, and money. How much?”

“Hardly any. Maybe five dollars, less what I’d spent for the movie ticket. And I’m not sure I had a Bonne Belle. I just told you that’s all I was allowed to have. I can’t remember everything. God, do you even know what’s in your purse right now?”

“Billfold,” Nancy Porter said. “Tic Tacs. Diaper wipes. I have a six-month-old. Lipstick. Receipts-”

“Okay, you can. I can’t. Hey, when they stopped me Tuesday night, I didn’t even know why my billfold wasn’t in my purse.”

“We’ll get to that.”

9:10 P.M.

“So once in the van…”

“We drove. We drove and we drove. It seemed like a very long time, but maybe my sense of time was off. He stopped at some point and got out. We tried the door-”

“You weren’t tied up, like your sister?”

“No, he was in a hurry. He just grabbed me and threw me in. I have no idea how he subdued Sunny.”

“But you said, ‘We tried the door’-”

“I untied her, of course. I didn’t let her stay tied up. He stopped, we tried the door, it was locked from the outside. And there was mesh between the rear of the van and the passenger compartment, so we couldn’t get out that way.”

“Did you scream?”

She looked at Nancy blankly.

“While he was outside the van. Did you scream, try to draw attention to yourselves?”

“No. We didn’t know where we were, if there was anyone out there to hear us. And he had threatened us, told us horrible things would happen-so no, we didn’t scream.”

Nancy glanced at the tape recorder but didn’t speak. That was good, Willoughby thought. She was using silence as a goad, waiting the woman out.

“We were in the country. There were…crickets.”

“Crickets? In March?”

“Some strange sound. Strange to us. Perhaps it was the absence of sound.” She turned to Gloria. “Do I have to talk about this part in detail? Is it really necessary?” Then, without waiting for an answer, she began the story that she claimed to be so loath to tell. “He took us into this house in the middle of nowhere. A farmhouse. He wanted to…do things. Sunny fought him, and he killed her. I don’t think he meant to. He seemed surprised when it happened. Sad, even. Is that possible? That he could have been sad? Maybe he had always meant to kill us, kill both of us, but then it happened and he realized that killing wasn’t something he was equipped for. He killed her, and then he told me that I could never leave him. That I would have to stay with him and his family, be a part of it. And if I didn’t…well, if I didn’t, then he would have no choice but to do to me what he’d done to Sunny. She’s dead, he said. I can’t bring her back. But I can give you a new life, if you let me.”

Willoughby had a vision of a highway, the way it shimmered sometimes in the late summer, how the air seemed to get wavy at sunset. There was a similar quality in this story, although he couldn’t quite put a finger on it. It began with the crickets, even though she had disavowed them. All he knew was that she was moving in and out of the truth, that parts were accurate but others had been… molded. Shaped. To whose expectations? To what purpose?

“His family? So there were other people involved in this?”

“They didn’t know everything. I’m not sure what he told his wife and son-maybe that I was a runaway who he’d saved from the streets in Baltimore, a girl who couldn’t go home for whatever reason. All I know is that he went to the library and read old newspapers until he found what he needed-a story about a fire in Ohio, several years before. An entire family had been killed. He took the name of the youngest child and applied for a Social Security number in that name. With that, he was able to enroll me at the parish school up in York.”

“Without anything but a Social Security number?”

“It was a parish school, and he told them that it was all I had, that everything had been destroyed and it would be months before he could get a birth certificate. He’d been a police officer, well respected. People generally wanted to please him.”

“So he enrolls you in school, sends you off every day, and you don’t try to tell anyone who you are or what you’ve been up to?”

“This didn’t happen right away. He waited until the next fall. For almost six months, I lived under his roof, with virtually no freedom. I was pretty broken down by the time I started going to school. I’d been told every day for six months that no one cared about me, that no one was looking for me, that I was dependent on him for everything. He was a grown-up-and a cop. I was a child. I believed him. Besides-I was being raped every night.”

“And his wife put up with this?”

“She turned a blind eye to it, as families do. Or maybe she rationalized that I was at fault, that I was a baby prostitute who seduced her husband. I don’t know. Over time you get numb to it. It was a chore, something I was expected to do. We lived between Glen Rock and Shrewsbury, which felt like a million miles away from Baltimore. Up there no one ever spoke about the Bethany girls. That was something that happened down in the city. And there were no Bethany girls anymore. Just a Bethany girl.”

“Is that where you live now? Is that where you’ve been all this time?”

She smiled. “No, Detective. I left there a long time ago. When I was eighteen, he gave me money, put me on a bus, and told me I was on my own.”

“And why didn’t you take the bus back to Baltimore, find your folks, tell everyone where you’d been?”

“Because I didn’t exist anymore. I had been Ruth Leibig, only survivor of a tragic fire in Columbus, Ohio. Normal teenager by day, consort by night. There was no Heather Bethany. There was nothing to go back to.”

“So that’s the name you’ve been using, then. Ruth Leibig?”

A broader smile. “You won’t get it that easy, Detective. Stan Dunham taught me well. I learned how to search old newspapers, too, how to find unclaimed identities and make them mine. It’s harder now, of course. People get Social Security cards earlier and earlier. But for someone my age there are still lots of little dead children’s names to use. And you’d be surprised how easy it is to get birth certificates if you have some basic information and a few…skills.”

“What kind of skills?”

“That’s none of your business.”

Gloria nodded. “Look, she’s given you the story. Now you know.”

“Here’s the thing,” Nancy said. “Everything she’s given us so far leads to a dead end. The farm, where all this happened? Gone, subdivided years ago, and there’s no record that any human remains were uncovered.”

“Check the parish school, Sisters of the Little Flower. You’ll find Ruth Leibig on the rolls.”

“Stan Dunham is in a hospice, dying-”

“Good,” she said.

“His wife has been dead for almost ten years. Oh, and the son? He died in an accidental fire just three months ago. In Georgia. Where he was living with Penelope Jackson.”

“He’s dead? Tony’s dead?”

If Willoughby had been younger, he might have shot out of his chair. Infante and Lenhardt, already standing, stiffened in their posture, leaned toward the speaker-box that was bringing the words to them.

“Did you-” Lenhardt began, even as Infante said, “She wasn’t surprised about the father, didn’t give a shit about Penelope Jackson or Georgia, but the son has caught her off guard. And she knew his name, although Nancy didn’t provide it.”

On the other side: “Be still, Heather,” Gloria said. “Now. Nancy, if you would give us a minute.”

“Sure. Take all the time you want.”

NANCY HAD WALKED out of the room, but she was practically prancing when she joined the circle of detectives. The girl was pleased with herself, as well she should be, Willoughby thought. She had done a good job. The thing about Pincharelli was a key omission. And Miriam had always insisted that Heather had taken an unusually large amount of money that day to the mall, because her bank at home was empty.

But it wasn’t good enough. He was the only one in the room who knew they had fallen short of proving she wasn’t Heather Bethany. He’d stake his life on the fact that she was lying, but he couldn’t prove it.

“Well?” she said to the three men.

“We waited for you,” Lenhardt said.

Willoughby picked up the envelope at his feet and opened it, although he knew what he would find inside. A blue denim purse, with red rickrack. Even within the light-deprived confines of an envelope, it had faded a little over the years, yet it was just as it had been described, except for the contents. But that’s only because there were no contents. The purse had been found next to a Dumpster, turned inside out, a tire mark on its side. The supposition had always been that Heather had dropped it during the abduction and that some opportunistic scum had stumbled on it, stripped it of whatever cash or items it contained, and tossed it aside.

Yet they couldn’t contradict her memory of what it had contained, because they didn’t know. Here was the purse, exactly as she’d described it. So if she was Heather Bethany, why didn’t she remember seeing her sister’s music teacher? Had Pincharelli been lying all those years ago? Had he broken down and told Willoughby what he wanted to hear because there was yet another secret he was hiding? He was dead, too. Everywhere they turned, people were dead or dying. That was the natural order of things, over thirty years. Dave was gone. Willoughby ’s Evelyn was gone. Stan Dunham’s wife and son were gone, and the man himself was as good as gone. Penelope Jackson, whoever she was, had disappeared, leaving behind nothing but a green Valiant. And the only thing they’d been able to establish with any certainty was that the woman in the interrogation room was not Penelope Jackson. Yet she had described the purse. Did that make her Heather Bethany? He thought back to the shimmer in the air, the moment he was sure that she was lying.

“Fuck me,” Lenhardt said.

“Well, the mom will be here soon,” Infante said. “It would have been nice if we didn’t have to put her through that, if we could have told her when she landed what was what, but at least DNA’s definitive. When we finally get it. Even with a rush, it will take a day or two.”

“Yeah,” Willoughby said. “About that…”

10:25 P.M.

The plane seemed to drone as sleepily as its passengers, most of whom were tired and disgruntled from being more than two hours past their scheduled arrival. In her first-class window seat, a luxury created by the necessity of buying a last-minute ticket, Miriam couldn’t begin to sleep, and she stared at the floor of clouds below the jet. It took a long time to break through the cloud cover, but Baltimore was finally beneath her, for the first time in almost twenty years. It was vast in a way that did not match her memories, its lights spread across a far wider area, but she hadn’t flown into Baltimore since 1968. The airport had still been called Friendship then, and Miriam was returning from Canada by way of New York. In the summer after the riots, it had seemed a felicitous time to take her children to Ottawa, let them spend an extended vacation with their grandparents. Oh, how dressed up they had gotten for that return trip, the girls in matching dresses purchased by Miriam’s mother at Holt Renfrew-striped shifts with scarves that attached to the collars with snaps. Sunny had been a mess twenty minutes into the journey, but Heather barely had a crease in her dress even upon landing. People could meet you at airport gates then. She remembered Dave, waiting for them inside the terminal, pale and round-shouldered, so beaten down by his job. A few years later, when he approached her with his dream of opening a store, that image came back to her, and she readily said yes. She had wanted him to be happy. Even when she was miserable, she had wanted nothing less for Dave than some sort of peace.

Suddenly there was a dead space beneath the plane, with almost no lights shining at all, an abyss. The plane had turned and was heading up the Chesapeake Bay. Although the final descent was quite smooth, Miriam’s stomach twisted once again from that strange turista-like ailment she had never known in all her years in Mexico, and she fumbled in the seat pocket for an airsickness bag, but there wasn’t one. Perhaps airlines didn’t provide them anymore, perhaps people were supposed to be able to fly without getting ill, at least in first class. Or someone had taken it and the overworked flight attendants hadn’t noticed. Miriam did the only thing possible, given the circumstances. She swallowed.