What The Dead Know Part 20

"But you'd be with me, right? I'd be scared, making those choices all alone."

"I think you can do it. You have a great eye, Pepper. Just the way you display things, your attention to the store's look-I swear, even when I buy a dud, you find a way to make people want it."

"The kind of things we sell-they're dreams, you know? Visions of what people want to be. No one needs anything we stock, even the clothes. So you have to group them to tell a story. I don't know, I'm sure I sound crazy-"

"You make perfect sense. Before I hired you, I seldom took a day off. Now I'm capable of being away from the store for up to, oh, twenty minutes at a time."

Dave's workaholism was an old, familiar joke between them, and Pepper whooped with delight, a loud, raucous sound that made him wince. She did not know what day it was. She probably didn't know that Dave Bethany had ever had two daughters, much less what happened to them. True, their images lived in a silver frame in the back room, on his desk, but Pepper never asked questions. She was not incurious, he believed, merely careful about delving too far into his past, lest he expect the same privilege in return. He really liked Pepper. He wished he could love her, or feel fatherly toward her, but that could never happen. Even if Pepper had been less reticent, he never would have allowed himself to feel paternal toward any young woman. In the past fourteen years, Dave had had lovers, women in his bed. But he never considered marrying again, and he had no desire to create daughters out of strangers. Pepper was his employee, nothing more.

OF COURSE, PEOPLE gossiped that she was more, later on. The next day, when emergency workers cut Dave down from an old elm tree behind his house, from the very branch where the tire swing had hung until the rope finally rotted away, they found a note directing them to a pile of papers on his desk, in the study where he had once chanted as the ghee burned at sunrise and sunset. No one needs the things we sell, Pepper had said, so you have to group them to tell a story. Dave hoped his groupings-his body, his papers, the balanced checkbook, the achingly neat house-would be understood. His letter might not be an official will, but its intentions were plain enough. He wanted Pepper to take over his business, while all his other a.s.sets, including those derived from the sale of the house, should be put in trust for the daughters that everyone else presumed dead, then released to certain charities in 2009.

"I feel awful," Willoughby confided over the crackle of the international line, having found Miriam through her former colleagues at the real-estate office. "It was just that day that I-"

"Don't feel bad, Chet. I don't. At least, I don't feel guilty about Dave."

"Yes, but..." The sentence, while unfinished, still managed to be quite cruel.

"I don't forget either," Miriam said. "I just don't remember in the same way. Which is to say, I don't wake up every morning and hit myself over the head with a frying pan and wonder why I have a headache, which was Dave's solution. The pain is there. It will always be there. It doesn't have to be stoked, or encouraged. Dave and I chose different ways to mourn, but we both mourned equally."

"I've never said otherwise, Miriam."

"I'm in language school here. Did you know that? I'm learning a new language at the age of fifty-two."

"I might do something like that," he offered, but she wasn't interested in what he was doing. At least Dave pretended to care about me, Willoughby thought.

"In Spanish there's a whole set of verbs where what would be the object in English becomes the subject. Me falta un tenedor. Literally, 'The fork is lacking to me,' not 'I need a fork.' Se me cayo. Se me olvido. 'It fell from me.' 'It forgot itself to me.' In Spanish it's understood that things happen to you sometimes."

"Miriam, I've never second-guessed anything you or Dave did to cope."

"Bulls.h.i.t, Chet. But you kept your opinion to yourself most of the time, and for that I love you."

He wished those words-so flippant, so unfelt-didn't hit him so hard. For that I love you.

"Stay in touch," he said. "With the department, I mean. If anything should come up-"

"It won't."

"Stay in touch," he repeated, pleaded, knowing all the time that she wouldn't, not forever.

A few weeks later, the day before his official retirement, he checked the Bethany case file out one more time. When the file was returned, any reference to the girls' biological parentage had been removed. Dave Bethany had always insisted that this part of the story was a cul-de-sac, a dead end, not unlike Algonquin Lane itself, which backed up to the more civilized edges of Leakin Park, an otherwise unruly bit of wilderness in the middle of the city. In the early days, just after the girls went missing, coa.r.s.e, curious types drove slowly by the house, their rubbernecking intentions exposed when they had to turn around at the street's end. Others had come to the store, buying small items to a.s.suage their guilt. How those people had pained Dave, how hurt he had been. "I'm a f.u.c.king freak show," he complained to Chet, more than once. "Take down the license plates," Chet advised him. "Make a note of the name if they pay by check or credit card. You never know who's driving by." And Dave, being Dave, had done just that. Taken down license plates, recorded every hang-up phone call, shook his family's life as if it were a snow globe, then set it back on the table and waited to see how the tableau might change. But no matter how many times he rearranged it over fourteen years, all the parts sifted back into place-with the exception of Miriam.

PART IX.

SUNDAY.

CHAPTER 37.

"We can lie about the bones," Infante said.

"But we don't have any bones," Lenhardt said. "We can't find the bones."

"Exactly."

Infante, Lenhardt, Nancy, and Willoughby were in the lobby of the Sheraton, waiting to take Miriam Toles to breakfast-a breakfast where they would admit they didn't have a clue as to the ident.i.ty of the woman she hoped to meet today, the woman for whom she had traveled over two thousand miles. She could be Miriam's daughter. Or she could be a brilliant liar who had decided to f.u.c.k with everybody's head for a week or so. To what end? Money? Boredom? Out-and-out insanity? Or was she safeguarding her current ident.i.ty because that name would pop out a criminal warrant for the person she now was? That was the only thing that made sense to Infante. He didn't believe for a minute that she was worried about her privacy. From his observation she grooved on attention, enjoyed their every encounter. No, she had something else to hide, and she was concealing it behind Heather Bethany's ident.i.ty, using this infamous old murder to distract them.

"We've been obsessing over the bones because of all the things they could establish if we had them. The parents aren't biological, but the sisters are. Right?"

Willoughby nodded. Twenty-four hours ago, according to Nancy, she had to sweet-talk him into watching the interview. Now they couldn't pry him away and Lenhardt was humoring him, rather than risk hurting his feelings and seeing him on the nightly news. Infante still couldn't get over how he had screwed with the case file, then all but encouraged them to bring Miriam back to Baltimore before they knew what was what, who was who. What had the guy been thinking? How could he have removed crucial information? No possibility could be ruled out, as far as Infante was concerned. One thing that Nancy had told him about cold cases-the name was always in the files.

"We already told her we didn't find the bones," Lenhardt said.

"We told her that we didn't find them at the address she provided. But I've just come back from Georgia, right, where Tony Dunham lived? For all she knows, the son could have dug them up and taken them away before his father sold the property, to prevent their discovery."

"That would be impressive," Lenhardt said. "I can't even get my son to mow the lawn."

"Seriously-"

"No, I'm hearing you, just trying to think it through. So we tell her we have her sister's bones. If she's lying, she capitulates-you think-because she knows she's going to have to submit to tests, and those will prove she's not related. But she's quick on her feet, this one. What if she says: 'Well, it could be some other body. Who knows how many times Stan Dunham did this, how many girls he killed?'"

"It's still worth a shot. I'd try anything right now to get an answer as quickly as possible out of her, to put the mother's mind to rest without making her go through the turmoil of meeting her, talking to her. If we could get her to confess..."

"Well, we're not going to figure out anything before breakfast," Lenhardt said, glancing at Willoughby. "We have to tell the mother how up in the air this is. She shouldn't have come, but I guess I should have known, as a parent, that nothing would hold her back once we called."

Infante usually hated it when Lenhardt invoked his standing as a parent, especially now that Nancy could nod solemnly, part of the club. But in this case Lenhardt seemed to be trying to mitigate Willoughby's guilt, so Infante didn't mind as much.

Nancy spoke up. "She would roll with anything we told her, somehow. That's my observation. You ever see that show, on cable, the one with the fat guy in gla.s.ses who does improvisations?"

The three men looked at her-Lenhardt and Willoughby completely lost, Infante clued into Nancy's vague pop-culture shorthand from their time as partners. "That piece of s.h.i.t? You couldn't pay me to watch it. Although I did like it when the black guy, the super nice one, made fun of himself on that other show. Does Wayne Brady have to choke a b.i.t.c.h? That was funny."

Nancy flushed. "Hey, you get up with a baby in the middle of the night and see what you watch. I only bring it up because she reminds me of that. She's quick, she thinks on her feet, and she gets what a lot of liars don't, that it's okay to make mistakes, because people do say the wrong stuff all the time. Like with the crickets? She didn't miss a beat when I pointed out it was March. She knows I caught her in a lie at that moment. But she kept going. Sergeant's right. You try that bones story on her, she won't blink."

The elevator opened, and Miriam Toles, after a quick look around the lobby, recognized Infante. Last night, when Infante met her at the airport, he had expected someone dressed more...well, Mexican. Not in a sombrero-he wasn't that ignorant. But perhaps one of those tiered skirts in bright colors, or an embroidered blouse. He also a.s.sumed that she would look older than her age, which records put at sixty-eight. But Miriam Toles had that sense of style that he'd seen in New York City women when he went into the city as a kid-silver hair in a severe, chin-level bob, large silver earrings, no other jewelry. He saw Nancy glance down at her own outfit, a pink shirt worn with a khaki skirt that was meant to hang a little looser than it did, and knew she was feeling dowdy and hickish. He bet that Miriam Toles often had that effect on other women. She wasn't truly pretty-she had probably never been pretty. But she was elegant and she had the remains of a killer figure.

Next to him he was conscious of Chet Willoughby straightening up a little, even sucking in his gut.

"Miriam," the old detective said, his manner a little stiff. "It's good to see you again. Although, obviously, not under these circ.u.mstances."

"Chet," she said, holding out a hand for a shake, and the old detective deflated. Had he been hoping for a kiss on the cheek, an embrace? It was weird, seeing this sixty-something guy all quivery with a crush. Didn't this ever end? Shouldn't it end? Lately, when every other commercial seemed to be about impotence-ED, as the ads called it, as if that were better-Infante had found himself thinking that it was silly to fight the body, that it must be almost a kind of relief to have your d.i.c.k lie down on the job, done at last. His would never give up the ghost, of course, he knew that much about himself, and it would be a burn if you got impotence as a side effect of some medication. But he'd been counting on, even hoping for, the end of the emotional insanity, that giddy rush of caring what another person thought of you. Watching Willoughby, he realized that it ended as everything else did-with death.

MIRIAM STARED DOWN at the lackl.u.s.ter fruit she had plucked from the breakfast buffet, hard little pieces of things not quite in season. She didn't want to be one of those tiresome people who was forever championing her way of life, but she already missed Mexico, the things she had come to take for granted over the last sixteen years-the fruit, the strong coffee, the lovely pastries. She was embarra.s.sed by this paltry brunch, much as the quartet of police officers seemed to find it a treat. Even the young woman was eating l.u.s.tily, although Miriam noticed her plate was all protein.

"I would have come anyway," she told them. "Once I heard the detail about the purse. True, I wish your information were more...definitive at this point, that you knew one way or the other. But even if this isn't my daughter, she clearly knows something about the day my daughters disappeared. Perhaps everything. Where do we go from here?"

"We'd like to put together a comprehensive biography of your daughter, filled with details that only she could know. The layout of the house, family stories, in-jokes. Anything and everything you can remember."

"That would take hours, maybe even days." And break my heart a thousand times over. For thirty years Miriam had understood that she had to share her family's saddest secrets with investigators-her husband's failing business, her affair, the roundabout way that Sunny and Heather had come to be their daughters. But she was jealous of the happy memories, the mundane, quotidian details. Those belonged to her and Dave exclusively. "Why don't you tell me what she's told you so far, and see if any of that rings false with me? Why won't you let me see her?"

The female detective, Nancy-it was overwhelming for Miriam, meeting so many new people-flipped through her notes. "She's been consistent on birthdays, the schools they attended, your address. Thing is, most of that is on the Internet or in news accounts, if a person is inclined to dig deep enough, pony up for the archive searches. At one point, she said something about vacations to Florida and a person named Bop-Bop-"

"That's right. Dave's mother. She coined that hideous name for herself because she couldn't bear to be anything matronly. She hadn't enjoyed being a mother and being a grandmother really discomfited her."

"But that's not exactly proprietary, is it? Heather could have told that to kids at school, for example."

"Yet would it be remembered thirty years later?" Miriam asked, then answered her own question. "Certainly you wouldn't forget Bop-Bop if you ever met her. She was a piece of work."

Willoughby smiled.

"What, Chet?" Miriam asked, sharper than she intended. "What's so amusing to you?"

He shook his head, not wanting to say anything, but Miriam caught his gaze and held it. She shouldn't be the only person answering questions this morning.

"You're just so very much as I remembered. The...candor. That hasn't changed."

"Gotten worse, I would think, now that I'm an old woman and don't care what anyone thinks of me. Okay, so this person knows Bop-Bop, she knows what Heather's purse looks like. Why don't you believe her, then?"

"Well, there's the fact that she doesn't remember seeing the music teacher, when he was adamant that he saw her," Nancy said. "And in the original notes you told investigators that Heather had a little box in her room where she kept her birthday and Christmas money, but the money-somewhere between forty and sixty dollars, by your recollection-was missing. So Heather took her money to the mall that day, but when we asked for the contents of the purse-"

"The purse was empty when it was discovered."

"Right. We know that. However, Heather wouldn't, unless she emptied it herself and threw it down, and no one thinks that happened. This woman didn't mention it, however. She said there was a little cash, a brush, and a Bonne Belle lip moisturizer because she wasn't allowed to wear real lipstick then."

"We didn't have rules about makeup per se. I told her it looked silly on young girls, but it was her choice. Bonne Belle sounds right, however. Plausible, at any rate."

Nancy sighed. "Everything she says sounds plausible. At least when she describes the day, what happened. It's when she describes the abduction and..." Her voice faltered.

"Sunny's murder," Miriam prompted. "You have avoided speaking of that part to me."

"It's just so lurid," the young woman said. "Like something out of a movie. The details of the day-what they had for breakfast, how they took the Number Fifteen bus to the mall-again, something that's in the news accounts, as is the usher who remembered them getting kicked out of Chinatown-those things ring true. But being kidnapped by a cop who takes them to a deserted farmhouse and decides to keep Heather instead of killing her after she witnesses the murder of her sister? When she gets to that part, all the details fall away, and the story no longer rings true."

"Is it the cop part?" Miriam asked. "Is that what's so unbelievable?"

To their credit, the four detectives, current and former, did not protest too quickly or readily, did not swear to the heavens that they had found it easy to consider one of their own as a killer and s.e.xual predator. Infante, the handsome one who had picked her up at the airport, spoke first.

"The cop part makes a lot of sense in some ways. That's how you would lure two girls away-show each one a badge, say you have her sister, that she's in trouble. Any kid would follow a cop."

"Maybe not Dave Bethany's children in 1975-Dave was given to calling police officers pigs, before we found ourselves in their debt, before Chet became a trusted friend." That was a conscious gift to Chet on her part, a way to make up for the sharpness in her voice earlier. "But okay, I see your point."

"It's just this particular cop, it doesn't really track," Infante continued. "He was in the theft division, a good guy, well liked. None of us knew him, but the guys who did are stunned by the idea that he could be involved in this. Plus, he's not even sentient, so he's an awfully convenient target."

"Dunham," Miriam said. "Dunham. Stan, you said?"

"Yes, and the son's name was Tony. Does the name mean anything to you?"

"Dunham rings a bell. We knew someone named Dunham."

"Not anyone you ever told me about," Chet began, his voice defensive. She put her hand on his forearm, wanting to comfort him, but also keen that he stop talking, so she could follow this train of thought.

"Dunham. Dunham. Dunned by Dunham." Miriam had a vision of herself at the old kitchen table in the house on Algonquin Lane. It was a rickety thing, a not-quite antique, pa.s.sed down from Bop-Bop's apartment when she left Baltimore. Foisted on them, Miriam would have said, more stuff for the house with too much stuff. There had been days when she felt she couldn't walk across a room without b.u.mping into a table or a footstool or some other object that Dave had dragged in. Dave had painted the table with taxicab-yellow lacquer and let the girls affix flower decals to it, which had looked good for all of two weeks, and then the decals had started to peel, leaving behind a sticky residue and pulling up bits of the paint. The green of the checkbook clashed horribly. Or maybe it just seemed that way because she was anxious when she paid their bills each month, watching them go a little further into the hole, playing the game of which creditor to appease this month, which one to let go a little longer. They had argued about expenses, but they could never agree on what was truly expendable. "Ghee costs nothing," Dave would say if Miriam suggested that the Fivefold Path was a practice the household could no longer afford. "Why can't you run her to and from school?" She would counter, "I have a job now, a job this family needs. I can't drop everything to chauffeur Sunny back and forth."

You could do the mornings.... But who would do the afternoons?...The guy is s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g us anyway, reversing the route in the afternoon.... We have to find some way to cut our budget.

It was an argument they had almost every month that year, and Miriam had prevailed every month, once again making out the check to Mercer Transportation, up in Glen Rock, Pennsylvania. She hadn't even known where Glen Rock was. But when the checks came back, they were endorsed by- "Stan Dunham owned the private bus company, Mercer, that we used to get Sunny to and from junior high every day."

"Mercer owned the property," the girl all but yelped. "It was an LLC, the previous owner before the development went in. I thought Dunham sold it to Mercer, but he must have simply transferred the deed to his own LLC. s.h.i.t, I can't believe I missed that."

"But we looked at the driver," Chet said. "It was one of the first people we checked out, and he had a solid alibi for the day the girls went missing. Stan wasn't the driver. You never told me about Stan."

Miriam understood his frustration, for she felt it, too. No one had been sacred in their search for the girls, no one had been presumed innocent. They had turned their life upside down and inside out, looking for names and connections. Relatives, neighbors, teachers had been considered, whether they knew it or not. Employees at Security Square had been checked for minor s.e.x charges, then brought in to talk to police, as if trafficking with a prost.i.tute necessarily led to kidnapping two adolescent girls. Her coworkers, Dave's a.s.sociates. They had even tracked down the man who drove the Number 15 bus route that day, the man Miriam always thought of as the one who had driven her daughters to their deaths, as sure as Charon ferried the dead across the river Styx. Suspicion was infinite, but energy and time proved finite. Dave's great, frantic fear, the anxiety that made life with him unbearable, was that they had not done everything they could, that there was always something else they should be doing, checking, examining.

And, sure enough, Dave had been right. Dunned by Dunham, he had sung. Are we being dunned by Dunham again? He had been polite, but stern, and they had quickly learned not to put him in their monthly roulette of bills that may or may not be paid. They could not afford to offend him, lest he drop Sunny from the route. But Dunham was nothing more than a signature, very black and emphatic, on the back of a check that returned each month from a bank in Pennsylvania.

CHAPTER 38.

Lenhardt was still trying to figure out the tip for brunch by the time Infante called the duty judge to alert him that they would need a search warrant for Stan Dunham's room in Sykesville. They met the judge outside the Cross Keys Inn, where he was having Sunday brunch, and in less than an hour Infante and Willoughby were on their way to the nursing home. Kevin had not wanted the old cop to come along, yet he couldn't help but indulge him. Something had been missed, a detail overlooked, all those years ago. No one's fault-once the driver was eliminated, why would anyone think of some faceless guy up in Pennsylvania, cashing checks? Still, he could tell that Willoughby was beating himself up.

"You know how we found the Penelope Jackson connection?" Infante asked. Willoughby was looking out the window, studying a golf course on the north side of the freeway.

"Some sort of computer search, I gather."

"Yeah, by Nancy. The first day I did the typical stuff-NCIC, all those databases. But I didn't think to check the f.u.c.king newspapers, on the off chance that Penelope Jackson had made news in a way that didn't generate a warrant. If Nancy hadn't done that, we wouldn't have made the connection between Tony and Stan Dunham. Even knowing what we did, we missed the timeline. Dunham's lawyer told me he sold the property a few years ago, but I didn't pin him down on the date. I a.s.sumed he was talking about the sale to Mercer, but he was talking about Mercer's sale to the developer."

"Thank you, Kevin," Willoughby said in a brittle voice, as if Infante had offered him an Altoid or something else utterly trivial. "But you're talking about an oversight you made in the first twenty-four hours of investigating a hit-and-run and a suspicious woman. I had fourteen years to work the Bethany case, and if the information about Dunham is correct, it means I never made a single significant discovery in the disappearance of the Bethany girls. Think about that. All that work, all that time, and I didn't actually learn anything. Pathetic."

"When Nancy started working cold cases, she told me the irony is that the name is always in the file, one way or another. But Stan Dunham's not in the file. You called the bus company, they gave you the name of the route's driver, you established it couldn't be him. Besides, we still don't know anything, other than the fact that there is some sort of connection between Stan Dunham and the Bethany family."