What The Dead Know Part 18

"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 b.u.t.tons. 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. G.o.d, 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 pa.s.senger 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 prost.i.tute who seduced her husband. I don't know. Over time you get numb to it. It was a ch.o.r.e, 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 ident.i.ties 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 s.h.i.t 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 sc.u.m 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.

"f.u.c.k 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 pa.s.sengers, most of whom were tired and disgruntled from being more than two hours past their scheduled arrival. In her first-cla.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce 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 cla.s.s. Or someone had taken it and the overworked flight attendants hadn't noticed. Miriam did the only thing possible, given the circ.u.mstances. She swallowed.

PART VIII.

THINGS AS THEY ARE (1989).

CHAPTER 34.

The last leg of Miriam's trip to language school was complicated by the fact that she didn't yet speak Spanish. A true Catch-22, she thought as she stood in the cavernous, chaotic bus station, where she had managed to purchase her first-cla.s.s ticket to Cuernavaca with a minimum of misunderstanding. She had gotten through customs and finessed the Mexico City cab system to get there and was feeling very proud of herself up until the moment she left the ticket counter, her bus ticket for Cuernavaca clutched in her trembling hand.

But how to find the right bus among those lined up in the lanes outside, rumbling and belching black smoke? The announcements on the PA system were nothing more than bursts of static, incomprehensible in any language. There was no information booth that she could find, no one seemed to speak English, and the halting Spanish she had acquired in her introductory course back in Texas was of little use. People stared at her blankly when she stammered out her questions, then released a torrent of words, peppering her with sounds. They wanted to help. Their faces were kind, their gestures affectionate and warm. They simply did not understand anything she said.

She studied her ticket, noted that it was blue, then began looking at the tickets in others' hands. There was a woman whose ticket was also blue, a tired-looking woman with the kind of profile that one saw in Mayan art-the n.o.ble, hawklike nose, the flat forehead.

"Cuernavaca?" Miriam asked.

The woman considered Miriam's question cautiously, as if she had known a lifetime of simple questions that turned out to be sinister and dangerous.

"Si," she said. "Ya me voy." She turned away, as if she thought Miriam's question had been a subtle order to move along. When she glanced back over her shoulder and saw Miriam following her, she picked up her pace, which was difficult as she was traveling with two large shopping bags. But it was more difficult for Miriam, with her suitcase strapped to a set of rollers, and she began to fall behind. The woman glanced back again, saw Miriam struggling, then registered the ticket in her hand, that it was the same as hers.

"Cuernavaca," she said, understanding. She waited for Miriam to catch up with her, then led her to the proper bus. "Cuernavaca," she repeated, smiling, as if Miriam were a child learning an essential word. "Cuernavaca," she said upon boarding, settling in a seat across the aisle. Then she dared a new bit of vocabulary, words that Miriam knew she should she know, words that she had learned at some point, but were lost to her. The woman tried again, speaking more slowly. Miriam laughed and threw up her hands, mocking her own ignorance. The woman smiled and laughed, too, seemingly relieved that she would not have to try to make conversation with this gringa stranger for the hour's journey south. She settled back in her seat, rummaged through one of her bags, and pulled out something wrapped in waxed paper. She peeled the paper away, revealing a mango on a stick coated with a thick sprinkling of what appeared to be chili pepper. Now that she was safe on the bus, almost at her destination, Miriam was relaxed enough to find this wondrous. If she had seen it just five minutes earlier, when she was still lost, it would have struck her as disgusting.

De donde es? That was what the woman had asked. Where are you from? It was too late to answer, and even if Miriam did-what would she say? She had boarded a plane in Austin this morning. Did that make her a Texan? Or should she say Canada, the place of her birth? Since her parents had died, she had no ties there. She still thought of Baltimore as home, but the fact was she had lived there a mere fifteen years, while Texas had been her home for the last thirteen. Where was she from? The only thing she was sure of was that she was getting out of Texas just in time, racing the recession as if it were an unruly wave sweeping up a beach.

She had been lucky, not smart. She had sold her own house eighteen months earlier, before the market began its precipitous slide. At the same time, she had divested herself of some longtime investments she had inherited from her parents. But it wasn't that she had predicted the stock market collapse in 1987 or Texas's real-estate woes on its heels. She had been toying with the idea of early retirement, so she had moved her money to CDs and other laughably conservative investments. And she hadn't bought a new house because she wasn't sure she wanted to stay in Texas. Her money would go so much further somewhere else. Lots of people didn't want to stay in Texas just now, and these people had cried in Miriam's office over the past few months, baffled by the concept of negative equity. "How can we owe?" one young woman had sobbed. "We bought the house, we made our payments, and now we're selling it. So why do we owe seven thousand dollars?" Bolder sellers tried to suggest that a Realtor should not be paid if the deal yielded no profit for them. It was an ugly time.

But even if things had been booming, Miriam would have made the same decisions. Her pathologically optimistic partners thought she was crazy, taking four weeks off just as the spring season was gearing up. "How can you leave now?" they asked. "Things are bound to pick up." They would think she was crazier still if they knew she didn't plan to return to work ever. She was going to study Spanish in a month-long immersion course, then find a place to live. In the United States, such a dream was at least a decade away. But here in Mexico, where a dollar currently bought you sixteen hundred pesos, it could be done. Not that she was sold on Mexico. Belize was a possibility, or Costa Rica.

In the blur of preparations for the first leg of her trip, she had not focused on the date right away. There had been so much to do, so many signatures, even more than a settlement required. Traveler's checks, the sublease agreement on her apartment, the sale of her car. (That alone should have alerted her coworkers she wasn't returning. Who could live in Texas without a car?) But three weeks ago, when she finally made the plane reservation, the date, March 16, had stared up at her from her Filofax. She decided it was a good omen, getting out of the country before another March 29.

THE BUS WAS WINDING through a mountain pa.s.s, and Miriam noticed the tiny white crosses along the roadside. Come to think of it, weren't buses always plunging down hills in Mexico? Such stories seemed a staple of the news. Bus accidents and mudslides and typhoons and earthquakes. On the cab ride from the airport to the bus station, she had seen abandoned buildings from the Mexico City earthquake of 1987, their fates still undecided. Most of the people she knew loved CNN, felt that it was an intellectual badge of honor to watch a cable channel with so much foreign news. Some called it the Crisis News Network, but Miriam felt that Ted Turner's ultimate subtext was, Be Glad You're Here. The rest of the world was shown as wild and unpredictable, p.r.o.ne to disaster and strife and civil war. Spend enough time with CNN and the United States seemed rea.s.suringly stable.

At last the bus arrived in downtown Cuernavaca. Miriam had a hotel reservation and an address in her pocket, but she had one more linguistic hurdle before she could truly arrive. According to the note from the school, one must haggle for taxis, agreeing on a fare before the trip. How did one do that without being conversant in Spanish? When she got to the head of the taxi line, she offered the driver a thousand pesos, then fifteen hundred, then two thousand, but he kept refusing her. She was on the verge of getting fl.u.s.tered and angry when she realized that they were talking about a difference of a few cents.

The cab plunged into the congested streets, and Miriam's eyes felt drunk from what they were trying to take in-a castle, one of Cortez's, decorated with a Diego Rivera mural, the zocalo, thronged on a Sunday afternoon, with a group of men in some sort of indigenous dress. Eventually, her driver turned down a grimy, nondescript street. Miriam's heart sank. She had booked a room at Las Mananitas, shockingly expensive by Mexican standards, the equivalent of an airport Marriott back in the States. It was to be her last splurge, her final extravagance. She had a.s.sumed the cost would guarantee quality and was dismayed when the driver stopped at a nondescript building. "Here?" she asked, then remembering. "Aqui?"

The driver grunted, all but threw her luggage on the sidewalk, and drove away. Suddenly a heavy wooden door was flung open and a trim blond man appeared, accompanied by two locals, who wordlessly took her bags. Ushered into an anteroom, she saw that the hotel was designed to be a glorious secret. It turned a blank face to the street, but it was situated on an expansive courtyard, with rooms ringing an emerald lawn where-of all things-white peac.o.c.ks strolled. She felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, exchanging the black-and-white of Kansas for the Technicolor of Munchkinland.

Oz made her think of the girls, their annual ritual of watching the televised version of the movie beneath an old quilt, which they threw over their heads at certain scary moments-the bellicose trees, the flying monkeys. Not the witch, interestingly, never the witch, although her early incarnation as Elvira Gulch unnerved them a little. But Margaret Hamilton had squandered her ability to scare them by appearing in those coffee commercials.