What The Dead Know Part 2

"Save the bulls.h.i.t for a summation, Gloria, and put the goods on the table. I have to determine that this case is in our jurisdiction."

"Oh, it's very much in your jurisdiction, Detective." Gloria made it sound kind of dirty, her style when talking to men. When Infante first got to know her, he thought the innuendos were a way of her fronting, trying to hide her s.e.xual orientation. But Lenhardt insisted it was a highly developed sense of irony, the kind of mindf.u.c.k that a professional mindf.u.c.ker like Gloria used just to stay in practice.

"So can I talk to her?"

"About the old case, not about the accident."

"s.h.i.t, Gloria, I'm a murder police. I could give a c.r.a.p about some fender bender on the Beltway. Unless-Wait, did she do it on purpose? Was she trying to kill the people in the other car? Man, maybe this is my lucky day and I can get two clearances, just like that." He snapped his fingers.

Gloria flicked her eyes over him, bored. "Leave the humor to your sergeant, Kevin. He's the funny one. You're the pretty boy."

THE WOMAN IN the hospital bed had her eyes closed tight, a kid playing possum. The light in the room showed up the fine hairs on her arm and the side of her face, blond peach fuzz, nothing intense. And there was a hollowed-out look beneath the eyes, a long-lived exhaustion. The eyes flickered open for only a moment, then closed again.

"I'm so tired," she murmured. "Do we have to do this now, Gloria?"

"He won't stay long, sweetie." Sweetie? "He just needs the first part."

The first part? Then what was the second?

"But that's the hardest part to talk about. Can't you just tell him and let me be?"

He needed to a.s.sert himself, stop waiting for the introduction that Gloria didn't seem intent on making.

"I'm Kevin Infante, a detective with Baltimore County homicide."

"Infante? As in Italian for baby?" Eyes still closed. He needed her to open them, he realized. Until this moment Infante had never considered how vital open eyes were to what he did. Sure, he had thought about eye contact, studied the way that various people used it, knew what it meant when someone couldn't meet his gaze. But he'd never had a subject sit there-lie there in this case-with eyes closed tight.

"Sure," he said, as if he'd never heard that before, as if two ex-wives hadn't thrown that back at him time and again.

Her eyes opened then. They were a particularly vivid blue, kind of wasted on a blonde. A blue-eyed brunette, that was his ideal, the light and the dark, an Irish girl with eyes put in with a dirty finger.

"You don't look like a baby," she said. Her voice, unlike Gloria's, carried no whiff of flirtation. She wasn't playing it that way. "It's funny, for a moment I had this vision of the cartoon character, the giant one who wore the diaper and the little cap."

"Baby Huey," he said.

"Yes. Was he a duck? Or a chicken? Or was he a baby-baby?"

"A chicken, I think." Maybe they should get the neurosurgeon in to see her. "You told someone you knew about an old murder here in Baltimore County. That's what I need to talk to you about."

"It began in Baltimore County. It ended-actually, I'm not sure where it ended. I'm not sure it ever ended."

"You're saying someone started killing somebody in Baltimore County and finished it elsewhere?"

"I'm not sure-in the end...well, not the end but the part where bad things happened. By then I didn't know where we were."

"Why don't you just tell me your story and let me figure it out?"

She turned to Gloria. "Do people-I mean, are we known? Still?"

"If they were here, they remember," the old lizard said in a much-gentler-than-usual voice. Was she hot for her? Was that why she was willing to risk taking a case that might not pay? It was hard enough to figure out other men's taste in women sometimes, much less a woman's, and Gloria wasn't sentimental that way in Infante's experience with her. "Maybe not the name, but the moment they hear the circ.u.mstances. But Detective Infante's not from here."

"Then what's the point of speaking to him?" She closed her eyes and settled back on the pillow. Gloria actually gave an embarra.s.sed what-can-I-do shrug. Infante had never seen her so gentle with a client, so solicitous. Gloria took good care of the people she represented, but she insisted on being the boss. Now she was all deferential, motioning him to follow her out into the hall. He shook his head and stood his ground.

"You tell me," he said to Gloria.

"In March 1975 two sisters left their family's house to go to Security Square Mall. Sunny and Heather Bethany. They were never seen again. And they weren't not seen again in the sense that police had a hunch what happened but couldn't prove anything. Not like the Powers case."

Powers was shorthand for a decade-old homicide, one in which a young woman had vanished, but no one doubted that her estranged husband was at the heart of that disappearance. They just couldn't prove it. The conventional wisdom was that the guy had hired someone and lucked out, finding the tightest-lipped, most loyal hit man ever, a guy who never had a reason to trade the information. A guy who never got locked up or bragged drunkenly to a girlfriend, Yeah, I did that.

"So she knows what happened?"

"I can hear you," the woman in the bed said. "I'm right here."

"Look, you're free to partic.i.p.ate in the conversation if you like," Infante said. Was it possible to roll one's eyes when they were closed? Her expression shifted subtly, as if she were a peeved teenager who just wanted Mom and Dad to leave her alone, but she didn't say anything else.

"There were some seeming leads in the early days. An attempt to collect ransom. Some, I think, what we would call persons-of-interest today. But nothing panned out. Virtually no evidence-"

"Sunny was short for Sunshine," said the woman in the bed. "She hated it." She started to cry but didn't seem to notice she was crying, just lay in the bed letting the tears flow down her face. Infante was still trying to work out the math. Thirty years ago, two sisters. How young? Gloria hadn't said. Young, obviously, young enough so that running away was ruled out and homicide a.s.sumed. Two. Who grabs two? That struck him as wildly ambitious and p.r.o.ne to failure. Wouldn't taking two sisters suggest something personal, a grudge against the family?

"Arthur Goode kidnapped more than one boy," Gloria said, as if reading his thoughts. "But that was before your time, too. He kidnapped a newspaper-delivery boy here in Baltimore and made him watch while...At any rate, he released the delivery boy unharmed. Goode was later executed in Florida, for similar crimes there."

"I remember that," said the woman in the bed. "Because it was like us, but not like us. Because we were sisters. And because-"

Here she broke down. She brought her knees to her chest, hugged them with her good arm, the one not bandaged and wrapped, and cried the way someone might heave after food poisoning. The tears and sobs kept coming, unstoppable. Infante began to worry that she might dehydrate herself.

"This is Heather Bethany," Gloria said. "Or was, many years ago. Apparently it's been a long time since she's used her real name."

"Where has she has been? What happened to her sister?"

"Killed," moaned the keening woman. "Murdered. Her neck snapped right in front of me."

"And who did this? Where did it happen?" Infante had been standing all this time, but now he pulled up a chair, realizing he would be there for hours, that he would need to set up the tape recorder, take an official statement. He wondered if the case was really the sensation that Gloria said it was. But even if she was exaggerating its fame, it was the kind of story that would mutate into a cl.u.s.terf.u.c.k when the news got out. They would have to proceed slowly, be delicate in their handling of it. "Where have you been, and why has it taken so long for you to come forward?"

Bracing herself on her right arm, Heather returned herself to a sitting position, then wiped her eyes and nose with the back of her hand, a child's gesture.

"I'm sorry, but I can't tell you. I just can't. I wish I had never said anything in the first place."

Infante shot Gloria a what-the-f.u.c.k look. Again she shrugged helplessly.

"She doesn't want to be Heather Bethany," Gloria said. "She wants to go back to the life she's made for herself and put this behind her. Her sister's dead. She says her parents are dead, too, and that jibes with my memory. There is no Heather Bethany, for better or worse."

"Whatever she calls herself, wherever she's been, she is by her own account the witness to the murder of a-How old was your sister?"

"Fifteen. And I was just about to turn twelve."

"The murder of a fifteen-year-old girl. She doesn't get to drop a bomb like that and waltz out of here."

"There's no one to arrest," the woman in the bed said. "He's long gone. Everyone's long gone. There's no point to any of this. I hit my head, I said something that I never meant to say. Let's just forget about it, okay?"

Infante motioned Gloria to follow him into the hall.

"Who is that?"

"Heather Bethany."

"No, I mean, what name is she going by now? Where does she live? What has she been up to? The cop who brought her in said the car was registered to Penelope Jackson. Is that her?"

"Even if I do have that information-and I'm not saying I do-I'm not authorized to give it to you."

"f.u.c.k authorized. The law is really clear on this, Gloria, all the way up to the Supreme f.u.c.king Court. She was driving a car, she was in an accident. She has to provide ID. If she doesn't want to do that, she can go straight from here to jail."

For a moment Gloria dropped all her arch mannerisms-the c.o.c.ked eyebrow, the half smirk. Strangely, it made her even less attractive. "I know, I know. But bear with me. This woman has been through h.e.l.l, and she wants to hand you the clearance of a lifetime, if you can be a little patient. Why not indulge her for a day or two? The way I see it, she's genuinely terrified of revealing her current ident.i.ty. She needs to trust you before she can tell you everything."

"Why? What's the big deal? Unless she's wanted for some other crime?"

"She swears up and down that she's not, that her only concern-and this is a direct quote-is becoming 'wacko of the week' on cable news. Once she's revealed as Heather Bethany, her life as she knows it is over. She wants to find a way to give you the case without giving up herself."

"I don't know, Gloria. This isn't my call. Something like this has to go up the chain of command, and they still might send me back to lock her up."

"Lock her up and she won't give you the Bethany case. She'll say it was a delusion born of the accident. Look, you should be delirious with her terms. She doesn't want any publicity, and your department hates being in the media. I'm the loser here, the one who won't get any b.u.mp, and may not even get paid."

At this, she reverted to form, batting her eyelashes and puffing out her lips in a monstrous pout. s.h.i.t, if anyone resembled Baby Huey, it was Gloria, with that fish mouth and beak of a nose. Beak-that was it, he had the image in his mind now. Not a beak, but a bill. Baby Huey was definitely a duck, and lord f.u.c.k a duck, as the old saying went.

CHAPTER 5.

A radio was playing somewhere. Or perhaps it was a television in a nearby room. Her room was dead silent, and the light was finally fading, which she found restful. She thought about work. Had she been missed yet? She had called in sick yesterday, but today she hadn't known what to do. It was a long-distance call, but she didn't have a calling card handy and she wasn't sure what would happen if she went through the hospital switchboard and she couldn't get to the pay phone in the hall without going past the patrolman outside her door. Did calling cards mask one's movements anyway? She couldn't take the chance. She had to protect the only thing she had, this sixteen-year existence built on someone's death, just as everything in her life had been made possible by someone's death. It was her real life, for better or worse, the longest life she had inhabited to date. For sixteen years she'd managed to have this thing that others would call a normal life, and she wasn't about to give it up.

It wasn't much of a life, to be sure. She had no real friends, only friendly colleagues and clerks who knew her well enough to smile. She didn't even have a pet. But she had an apartment, small and spare and neat. She had a car, her precious Camry, a purchase she had rationalized because of the commute to work, an hour on a good day. Lately she'd been listening to books on tapes, fat womanly novels as she thought of them. Maeve Binchy, Gail G.o.dwin, Marian Keyes. Pat Conroy-not a woman, obviously, but the same kind of storyteller, unafraid of big emotions and big stories. s.h.i.t, she had three tapes due back at the library Sat.u.r.day. For sixteen years she had never been late for anything-a payment, a library book, an appointment. She hadn't dared to be. What happened if you turned in tapes late? Did the fines accrue? Did they report you somewhere?

It was ironic, given her work on Y2K compliance, but she had long lived in fear of centralization, a day when the machines would learn to speak to one another, compare notes. Even as she was paid to prevent it, she had been secretly rooting for a systemic breakdown that would wipe all the tapes clean, destroy every bit of inst.i.tutional memory. The pieces were out there, somewhere, waiting for someone to put them together. This woman-she has the name of a child who died in Florida in 1963. How odd-because this woman, who resembles her, had the name of a child who died in Nebraska in 1962. Yet this woman was a child who died in Kansas in 1964. And this one? She was from Ohio, born in 1962 as well.

At least it would be easy to remember who she was now: Heather Bethany, born April 3, 1963. Resident of Algonquin Lane 196678. Ace student at d.i.c.key Hill Elementary. Where had the family lived before? An apartment in Randallstown, but she wouldn't be expected to remember anything about that time. That was the tricky part. Not knowing what she should know but remembering what she wouldn't know.

What else? School #201. d.i.c.key Hill. Predictable jokes about the name. A newer building at the time. Jungle gym, chin-up bars in three heights, a slide that became hot to the touch on June days, hopscotch and foursquare grids painted in bright yellow. There had been a merry-go-round, not the kind with horses but one of those rickety metal ones. No, wait, that hadn't been at the school but somewhere nearby, some-place vaguely forbidden. In the Wakefield apartments that surrounded the school? In her mind she remembered the dirt track first, because she pushed more often than she rode. Head down, like a horse in harness, she had lined up behind the boys, linking her left arm into the metal bar and beginning to run, making the riders scream with delight. She saw the toe of her-she needed a second to remember the shoes. Not athletic shoes, which is why she got in trouble. She was wearing her school shoes, brown, always brown, because brown was practical. But even practical brown couldn't stand up to the orange dust of that playground, especially after the April rains. She had come home with dirt caked onto the toes, much to her mother's exasperation.

What else could she tell them? There were eight sixth-grade teachers that year. Heather had the nice one, Mrs. Koger. They took the Iowa Basic Skills Test, and she was in the ninety-ninth percentile in everything. They did science projects that fall. She had netted crawfish from Gwynns Falls and put together an elaborate aquarium, but all four had died. Her father theorized that clean water was a shock to their systems after the murky, polluted stream and her exploration of that thesis had earned her an A anyway. Thirty years later she was beginning to have a clue how the crawfish had felt. You knew what you knew, you wanted what you wanted, even if it was literally sc.u.m.

But, of course, this was not what they would demand of her. They didn't want the story of Heather Bethany before 1975. They wanted to know about the subsequent thirty years, and small details would not satisfy. She could not placate them with anecdotes about, say, her boxy little tape recorder. It was the first purchase she was allowed to make, a reward for six months of living by their rules, for proving her trustworthiness. They were okay with the tape recorder but appalled by the handful of tapes she bought as well. The Who, Jethro Tull, even some of the earlier punk bands. She would lie on the b.u.mpy chenille bedspread, still in her school uniform, and listen to the New York Dolls and, later, the Clash. "Turn it down," she was ordered. "Get your shoes off the bedspread." She would obey, but everyone was still appalled. Perhaps they knew that she, like Holly in the Lou Reed song, was plotting to get on the bus and go take a walk on the wild side.

The irony was that they put her on the bus, sent her away as if she were the criminal. They meant to be kind. Well, he did. Her? She was glad to see her leave. Irene had always resented her presence in the household-not because of the pretense required in the external world but because of the reality of what happened within the house. She was the one who carped about the shoes on the bedspread and insisted that the music be turned down to a whisper. She was the one who offered neither solace nor salve for the bruises, wouldn't even help concoct a reasonable cover story for those badges of occasional resistance-the cut lip, the black eye, the hobbled walk. You got yourself into this, Irene's placid manner seemed to suggest. You brought this on yourself and destroyed my family in the bargain. In her head she shouted back, I'm a little girl! I'm just a little girl! But she knew better than to raise her voice to Irene.

The music drowned it all out. Even when it was turned down to whispery volumes, the music made everything go away-the a.s.saults, physical and spiritual, the exhaustion brought on by the double life that was really a triple life, the sadness in his face every morning. Make it stop, she pleaded with him silently from across the round breakfast table, so homey and warm, so everything she had thought she wanted. Please make it stop. His eyes replied, I can't. But they both knew that was a lie. He had started it, and he was the only person who could find an end to it. Eventually, he proved that he had the power all along to save her, but it was too late. By the time he let her go, she was more broken than Humpty Dumpty, more shattered than the heads of Irene's precious china dolls, which she had smashed with a poker one brilliant fall afternoon. Composure finally lost, Irene had flown at her, screaming, and even he had pretended not to understand why she would do such a thing.

"They wouldn't stop looking at me," she said.

The real problem, of course, was that no one looked at her, no one saw. Every day she walked out into the world with nothing more than a name and a hair color to disguise her-and no one ever noticed. She came to the breakfast table, aching in parts of herself that she barely knew, and the only thing anyone said was, "Do you want jelly on your toast?" Or, "It's a cold morning, so I made hot chocolate." See me, Roger Daltrey sang on her little red tape recorder. See me. Irene called up the stairs, Turn that noise down. She yelled back, It's opera. I'm listening to an opera. Don't sa.s.s me. You have ch.o.r.es.

Ch.o.r.es. Yes, she had a lot of ch.o.r.es, and they didn't end at nightfall. Sometimes she made a list, called Who-I-Hate-the-Most, and Irene was never lower than three, and sometimes she made it as high as two.

Number one, however, was hers and hers alone.

PART II.

THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR (1975).

CHAPTER 6.

"Take your sister," their father said, in both girls' hearing, so Sunny couldn't lie about it later. Otherwise, Heather knew, her older sister would have nodded and pretended agreement, then left her at home anyhow. Sunny was sneaky that way. Or tried to be, but Heather was forever catching her in her schemes.

"Why?" Sunny protested automatically. She must have known that the argument was lost before it began. It was pointless to argue with their father, although, unlike their mother, he didn't mind when they talked back. He was happy to have long discussions in which he debated their points. He even helped them shape their side of things, build their cases like lawyers, which he was always reminding them that they could be. They could be anything they wanted, their father told them frequently. Yet in an argument with him, they could never be right. It was not unlike playing checkers with him, when he would guide his opponent's hand with small shakes and nods of his head, letting the girls avert disastrous moves that might result in double-or even triple-jumps. Still, he somehow claimed victory in the final play, even when he was down to just one king.

"Heather's only eleven," he said in what the sisters thought of as his reasoning voice. "She can't stay home alone. Your mother's already left for work, and I have to be at the shop by ten."

Head lowered over her plate, Heather watched them through her lashes, still as a cat studying a squirrel. She was torn. Normally she pushed for greater privileges whenever possible. She wasn't a baby. She would be twelve next week. She should be allowed to stay at home alone on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon. Since her mother had started working last fall, Heather was alone for at least an hour every afternoon, and the only rules were that she mustn't touch the stove or have friends over. Heather liked that hour. She got to watch what she wanted on television-The Big Valley, usually-and eat as many graham crackers as she wanted.

That bit of freedom, however, had been forced on her parents. They had wanted Heather to wait in the d.i.c.key Hill Elementary School library after school until Sunny could collect her, the same plan they had used when Heather was in fifth grade and fourth grade before that. But d.i.c.key Hill got out at three and Sunny didn't get home from junior high until past four now that her bus ride was so long. The princ.i.p.al at d.i.c.key Hill had told Heather's parents in no uncertain terms-that was her mother's recounting of the story, and the phrase had stuck with Heather, in no uncertain terms-that her librarian was not a baby-sitter. So Heather's parents, always eager not to be seen as people who expected special treatment, had decided that Heather could be in the house by herself. And if she could be by herself for an hour every day, Monday through Friday, then why couldn't she be alone for three hours on a Sat.u.r.day? Five was greater than three. Plus, if she won the right to stay home today, maybe she would never have to spend another deadly dull Sat.u.r.day in her father's store, much less her mother's real-estate office.

But that long-term possibility paled alongside the prospect of a Sat.u.r.day at Security Square Mall, a place of great novelty to Heather. Over the past year, Sunny had fought for and won the right to be dropped off there on Sat.u.r.day afternoons, once a month, to meet friends for matinees. Sunny also got to baby-sit, earning seventy-five cents an hour. Heather hoped to start doing that, too, once she was twelve, which was just next week. Sunny complained that she spent years trying to gain her privileges, only to see Heather awarded them at a younger age. So what? That was the price of progress. Heather couldn't remember where she had heard that phrase, but she had adopted it for her own. You couldn't argue with progress. Unless it was something like the highway through the park, and then you could. But that was because there were deer and other wildlife. That was the environment, which was more important than progress.

"You can go to the mall today if you take your sister," their father repeated, "or you can stay home with her. Those are your choices."

"If I have to stay at home with Heather, shouldn't I be paid for babysitting?" Sunny asked.

"Family members don't charge one another for doing things for the family," their father said. "That's why your allowance isn't ch.o.r.e-based. You get spending money because your mother and I recognize that you need some discretionary income, even if we don't always approve of the things you buy. The family is an ent.i.ty, joined in a common good. So no, you don't get money for taking care of your sister. But I will provide bus fare for both of you if you want to go to the mall."