What The Dead Know Part 5

THURSDAY.

CHAPTER 11.

"The thing is," Infante said to Lenhardt, "she doesn't look like a Penelope."

The sergeant bit. "What does a Penelope look like?"

"I dunno. Blond hair. Pink helmet."

"What?" Drawing it out to two syllables.

"That old cartoon? The one where there was a car race every Sat.u.r.day and they sucked you into believing that the outcome was somehow unknown? Anyway, Penelope Pit Stop was the name of the pretty one. They hardly ever let her win."

"It's Greek, though, right? I mean, not to take anything away from Hanna-Barbera, but I think there's some famous story about Penelope, something to do with knitting and a dog."

"What, like Betsy f.u.c.kin' Ross?"

"Slightly before that. Like a few thousand years, a.s.shole."

Just twenty-four hours ago, when Infante was on the s.h.i.t list, this conversation would have been completely different-same words, perhaps, but a much less friendly tone. Yesterday Lenhardt would have been up for the same bulls.h.i.t conversation, but the insults, the digs at Infante's intelligence, would have been serious, barbed rebukes. Today, however, Infante was a good boy. Two hours of overtime last night, at his desk bright and early, despite having stopped at the impound lot on his way in, and now at his computer, where he had pulled up Penelope Jackson's North Carolina driver's-license info and quickly arranged to get a copy of her photo faxed by the state police there.

Lenhardt squinted at the likeness, fuzzy from being enlarged on a photocopier. "So is it her?"

"It could be. Theoretically. The age, thirty-eight, isn't that far off the mark, although our girl's claiming older, which you don't get much. Hair and eye color are consistent. Hair's long in the photograph, cropped short in real life. The one in the hospital is definitely thinner than this."

"Women cut their hair all the time," Lenhardt said, his voice a little wistful, as if this fact made him sad. "And some even manage to drop a few pounds around the time they turn forty, or so I'm told." Mrs. Lenhardt was a knockout, but a bit on the plump side.

"Still, I don't think it's the same face. This one here's got a look to it. Kind of surly and cunning. The Jane Doe at St. Agnes, she's softer. I mean, I don't doubt she's lying to me-"

"Of course." Lying was a.s.sumed in their line of work.

"But I'm not sure what she's lying about, or to what purpose. If she isn't Heather Bethany-if she's Penelope Jackson or someone else still-then how does she know to bring up this thirty-year-old case when she's arrested? And how does she have the good fortune to fit the description, more or less?"

Infante pulled up another file on the computer, this one from a national database on missing children. He hadn't known how to do this, but a quick call to his old partner, Nancy Porter, had pointed the way. Here were the two girls, Heather and Sunny, as they had been at eleven and fourteen, their last school pictures. Below the actual photos were an artist's interpretations of how those girls might look today.

"She look like that?" Lenhardt asked, tapping the photo of Heather with his index finger-and leaving a little smear on Infante's screen, right in the middle of the girl's nose.

"Kinda. Maybe. Yes and no."

"You been to a reunion, college or high school?"

"Naw. That stuff doesn't do anything for me. And it's all the way back on Long Island, where I got no people now."

"I went to my thirty-year high school reunion a few years back. People age all different ways. Some, yeah, they looked like themselves, just a little older. Some just go, male and female. Like, you know, they got tired of trying. There were cheerleaders who weighed three hundred pounds, former football stars who managed the trick of going bald and developing dandruff. I mean, they bear no resemblance to the people they used to be."

"I bet you liked that-going into the reunion with a pretty wife fifteen years younger than you."

Lenhardt raised his eyebrows in mock surprise, as if it had never occurred to him that his wife was hot, when Infante knew the guy lived for the covetous glances thrown his way.

"But there's a third type, female division only," he said. "New and improved, better than they ever were. Sometimes with plastic surgery, but not always. They work out. They dye their hair. They've totally reinvented themselves, and they know it. That's why they show up, so you'll know it, too. The only way you could tell their age at all was by looking at their elbows."

"Who looks at a woman's elbows, you sick f.u.c.k?"

"I'm just saying it's the one place that a woman can't hide her age. My wife told me. She lemons hers sometimes. Cuts a lemon in half, hollows it out, fills it with olive oil and kosher salt and sits at her vanity, arms up like a little bunny." Lenhardt demonstrated the pose. "I tell you, Kevin, it's like going to bed with a f.u.c.king tossed salad."

Infante laughed. Yesterday he wouldn't have dreamed of admitting to himself how anxious it made him feel, being on the boss's bad side. He had preferred to rage instead at the unfairness of it all. But today he was redeemed, a good detective with a d.a.m.ned interesting case, and he couldn't deny the relief. If this woman was Heather Bethany, she was going to give them a sweet clearance. If she wasn't-well, she almost certainly knew something about something.

"Here's what struck me," he said, flipping to the notes he had taken at the impound lot. "We have this car registered in North Carolina two years ago. Penelope Jackson is no longer at that address, and her landlord, when I tracked him down, said she wasn't the kind of solid citizen who left a forwarding address. Said she followed whatever man she got her hooks into, picked up bartending and waitressing jobs. So she moved out almost ten months ago but didn't update her registration or license."

"Such wickedness," Lenhardt said with a whistle. "How long did you live in Maryland before you got around to registering your car?"

"You can't believe how they screw out-of-state people on t.i.tle transfers," Infante said. "But then-you're one of those Baltimorons who thinks you've seen the world because you moved twenty miles out of the city. Anyway, the car's backseat is trashed-burger wrappers, some of 'em pretty fresh, cigarette b.u.t.ts, although the gal in the hospital isn't a smoker. You'd smell it on her if she were, and she'd be jumpy from nicotine withdrawal. It's a car that looks as if it's traveled a ways. But no suitcase. A purse, but no wallet on her when she's picked up and no cash. It's just garbage and the registration. How do you travel more than three hundred, four hundred miles without a credit card or a wad of cash?"

Lenhardt reached around Infante, pressing a few computer keys, toggling back and forth between Penelope Jackson of Asheville, North Carolina, and Heather Bethany of yesterday and today. "I wish we had one of those computers that movie cops had," he said.

"Yeah-then all we'd have to do is input Penelope Jackson and her last-known address and her whole life would be open to us. I can't wait until they get around to inventing those computers. Those and jetpacks."

"Nothing in NCIC?"

"Nothing in NCIC. No military record. And no report that this is a stolen vehicle."

"You know," Lenhardt said, reading through the information on the missing children site, "there's a lot of detail here. Enough for a true-crime junkie to bone up, as it were."

"Yeah, I thought of that. But there's some stuff that's not here. Their exact address, for example, on Algonquin Lane. And the patrol who pulled her over? He said she was babbling about an old pharmacy at Windsor Mill and Forest Park. There's no such thing now. But I called the reference room at the Pratt, and there was a Windsor Hills Pharmacy there, around the time the girls disappeared."

"Kevin called the lie-berry? Man, you are bucking for employee of the month. So what about the case file? That's where you're going to find the level of detail that will make it impossible for some Internet surfer to fake you out."

Infante just gave his boss a look, the kind of look that conveys a world of meaning, a look available only to long-married couples or coworkers who've shared many years in the same bureaucracy.

"Do not f.u.c.king tell me-"

"I called for it yesterday afternoon, soon as I got back from the hospital. It's not here."

"Gone? Gone-gone? What the f.u.c.k?"

"There's a note where the file should be, left by the former primary-a guy who's since made sergeant and been posted to Hunt Valley. He was pretty sheepish when I tracked him down. Admitted he took it out for his predecessor on the case and just plain forgot about it."

"Sheepish? He should have been s.h.i.tting himself. Bad enough to let the file leave the building, but to send it off with a former police and forget about it?" Lenhardt shook his head at the excess of idiocy involved. "So who has it?"

Infante glanced down at the name. "Chester V. Willoughby IV. Know him?"

"Know of him. He retired before I started out here, but he showed up at some of the homicide reunions. You could say he was...uh, atypical."

"Atypical?"

"Well, for one thing he's a f.u.c.king fourth. You might meet a junior police, but you ever know a fourth? And he came from money, didn't even have to work. When did the file go out?"

"Two years ago."

"Let's just hope he hasn't died since then. It wouldn't be the first time that some obsessed old coot took a file home and we all but had to go to probate to get it back."

"Man, I hope I'm not never like that."

Lenhardt had reached for the in-house directory and began thumbing through it, then punching in numbers, starting the hunt for the old cop's home address. "h.e.l.lo-yeah, I'll hold." He rolled his eyes. "On f.u.c.kin' hold with my own department. And who are you kidding, Infante?"

"What?"

"There are supposed to be cases that eat at you. If there aren't, you're just lucky. Or stupid. This guy caught the reddest of red b.a.l.l.s, two angelic-looking girls, vanishing at a mall on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon with hundreds of people around. I wouldn't wipe my a.s.s with a police who didn't carry that with him for the rest of his life." Then, back into the phone. "Yeah? Yeah. Chester Willoughby. You got an address on him?" Lenhardt was clearly put on hold again, and he mimed an up-and-down pumping motion with his left hand until the person came back on the line. "Great. Thanks."

He hung up, laughing.

"What's so funny?"

"In the time that took, you coulda walked over there. He's in Edenwald, behind the Towson Town Center mall, not even a mile from here."

"Edenwald?"

"Retirement community, one of the pricey ones where you pay extra money so you can die in your own bed. Like I said, he comes from money."

"Do you think that rich cops work more OT or less?"

"They probably work more, but don't put in for it. Hey, maybe you ought to pretend you're rich sometimes, see what it's like to work an hour out of love."

"Not even for your baby blues."

"What if I kiss you first?"

"I'd rather take it up the a.s.s and get the cash."

"Well, that makes you a f.a.ggot and a wh.o.r.e."

Whistling, Infante grabbed his keys and headed out, feeling about as content as he ever did.

CHAPTER 12.

"Buenos dias, Senora Toles."

Miriam fished her keys out of her battered leather bag-"distressed" is what she would say if she were trying to sell it to someone-and unlocked the door to the gallery. She loved the way "Toles" sounded in Spanish-Toe-lez, instead of the flat, ugly syllable it was meant to be, "Tolls," a word that denoted fees and payments. No matter how long she lived in Mexico, it never got old, this aural transformation of her maiden name.

"Buenos dias, Javier."

"Hace frio, Senora Toles." Javier rubbed his bare arms, which were goose-pimply. Such a March day would have been considered a G.o.dsend back in Baltimore, not to mention Canada, but it was frigid by San Miguel de Allende's standards.

"Perhaps it will snow," she said in Spanish, and Javier laughed. He was simple-minded and laughed at almost anything, but Miriam still appreciated his ready laughter. Once, before, her sense of humor had been a key part of her personality. It was rare now that she made anyone laugh, which puzzled her, because Miriam felt she remained capable of wit. In her head she amused herself constantly. Granted, it was a cruel wit, but her sensibility had always been on the cynical side, even when the cynicism was unearned.

Javier had attached himself to the gallery and Miriam shortly after she began working there. A teenager at the time, he hosed down the sidewalk in front of the shop, cleaned its windows without being asked, and told the turistas in a confidential whisper that it was el mejor, the very best of all San Miguel de Allende's shops. The owner, Joe Fleming, considered him a mixed blessing. "With that walleye and that cleft palate, he probably scares away as many customers as he brings us," he complained to Miriam. But she liked the young man, whose affection for her seemed rooted in something much deeper than the tips she slipped him.

"Ha visto nieve?" Have you seen snow, Senora Toles?

Miriam thought of her childhood in Canada, the endless winters that made her feel as if her family had been exiled from some more desirable climate. She had never gotten a satisfactory answer as to why her parents chose to leave England for Canada. Her mind skipped ahead to the blizzard of 1966 in Baltimore, a freak meteorological legend. It had fallen on Sunny's sixth birthday, and they'd taken six little girls from her cla.s.s to see The Sound of Music in a downtown theater. It had been sunny and cloudless when they entered. Two-plus hours later, the n.a.z.is vanquished and the world safe once again for family singing troupes, the party emerged to find a city in near-whiteout conditions. How she and Dave had struggled through the streets of Baltimore, delivering each daughter to her parents-literally delivering them, carrying them so their party shoes would not be ruined, handing them to mothers and fathers standing worriedly in their doorways. They laughed about it later, but it had been terrifying at the time, the old station wagon slithering over the roads, the girls shrieking in the back. Yet Sunny and Heather later remembered it as a grand adventure. That was the miracle wrought by a happy ending. You were free to relive a terrifying story as if it were merely exciting.

"No," she told Javier. "I've never seen snow."

She told such small lies all the time. It was easier. Mexico required less lying than the places she'd lived before, because it was a place full of people trying to leave various things and people behind. She a.s.sumed all the ex-pats lied as much as she did.

Miriam had come to San Miguel de Allende for a weekend in 1989 and essentially never left. She had intended to choose a less Americanized Mexican city in which to settle-and, not incidentally, a cheaper one, where she might have been able to live on her savings and investments alone, not work at all. But within two days of alighting from the train, she couldn't imagine living anywhere else. She had returned to Cuernavaca to collect the rest of her things, then arranged to sell her possessions in storage back in the States. When she bought her little house, her casita, she started with only a bed and her clothes. Today she didn't have much more. That was something else, like hearing the Spanish-soft version of her name, that never got old-waking up in a bare, uncluttered s.p.a.ce of whitewashed walls and fluttering, sheer white curtains. The furniture, what there was of it, was pine. The Saltillo floors had been left bare. The only colors in Miriam's apartment were in her dishes and housewares, vivid blues and greens, purchased on discount from the gallery. If she decided to move again, it would take her no more than a day or two to dispose of her things. She had no intention of moving again, but she liked having the option.

The house on Algonquin Lane had been full of stuff, bursting with it. Miriam hadn't minded at first. For one thing, so much of what they carried then had belonged to the girls. Children didn't travel light, not even in those pre-car-seat days. They had toys and hats and mittens and dolls and stuffed animals and those hideous plastic trolls and, in Heather's case, a blanket known as "Bud," whose intermittent disappearances kept the household in a frenzy. Sunny, not to be outdone, had an imaginary friend, a dog named Fitz. Strangely, Fitz was as capable of getting lost as Bud. In fact, Fitz got lost whenever Bud got lost, and then some, and Fitz proved much harder to find. Sunny would stomp up and down the stairs of the house, reporting grimly on his non-whereabouts. "Not in the bas.e.m.e.nt." "Not in the bathroom." "Not in your bed." "Not under the sink." For an imaginary dog, Fitz required a lot of care. Sunny began putting food down for him, refusing to understand that this was an invitation for roaches and rodents. She left the back door open, so Fitz could go outside. On rainy days Miriam came to believe that she could smell a wet dog.

The house on Algonquin Lane had baggage of its own, as it turned out. Purchased at auction, Miriam's first taste of her talent for real estate, it had come "as is." Miriam and Dave had understood that this meant the systems weren't guaranteed, that it was a bit of a Let's Make a Deal gamble. What they hadn't realized was that the house wouldn't be cleaned in any way. The longtime residence of an elderly woman, it had the feel of a life interrupted, as if aliens had swept in and kidnapped the people there. A cup and saucer sat on the table, a spoon at the ready for a pot of tea that was never made. A book lay on the stairs, as if to remind someone to carry it up. The old furniture was draped with antimaca.s.sars, a few askew, waiting for a gentle hand to set them straight. It reminded Miriam of a nineteenth-century version of the automated house in that Bradbury story "There Will Come Soft Rains." The family was gone, but the house lived on.

Initially, the things left behind had seemed a bonus, a windfall. Some of the furniture was usable, and the dishes were actually valuable-Lowestoft china, too good for everyday use, nicer even than Miriam's dinner-party china. In the backyard the girls found the remains of tea sets hidden in odd places-in the gnarled roots of the old oaks, beneath the lilac bushes, where they had rusted just a little. But these discovered treasures quickly became oppressive. They had to move as many things out as they did in. Why had so much stuff been left behind? They had been in the house for two months when a helpful neighbor volunteered that the former owner had been murdered in the kitchen by her own nephew, her only heir.

"That's why it went to auction," said the neighbor, Tillie Bingham. "She was dead and he was in prison, so he couldn't inherit."

She lowered her voice, although the girls were out of earshot and uninterested in this over-the-fence conversation. "Drugs."

Spooked, Miriam had tried to persuade Dave to put the house back on the market, even if it meant taking a loss. They could be downtown homesteaders, she told him, knowing what would appeal to him, settling in one of the grand old town houses of Bolton Hill. This was before the era of the dollar house, before the great revival of downtown, but Miriam's instincts about real estate were always sound. If Dave had heeded her advice, they would have had a far more valuable house in the end, for the values in their little corner of Northwest Baltimore remained flat for years.

And, of course, the girls would be alive.

That was the secret game that Miriam could never stop playing with herself, unhelpful as she knew it to be. Go back into history, change one thing. Not the day itself. That was too obvious, too easy. Their doom was sealed before that day dawned, when Sunny decided to spend the afternoon at the mall and Heather lobbied for permission to join her. But if she could go a little further back, then destiny could be thwarted. If they had put the house on Algonquin Lane up for sale as Miriam had urged, if they had never purchased it at all, then the chain of events could be disrupted. She wondered who owned it now, if the current residents knew of its talent for death. One murder in a house was bad enough, but if a buyer knew the full story of Algonquin Lane...No, not even Miriam could sell that house, and Miriam, in her heyday, could sell almost anything.

Hindsight was twenty-twenty, as the cliche would have it, but not always. After the girls had disappeared, Dave had proved to be even more myopic about their past than he had been about their present. Their problem, their curse, he insisted to neutral third parties, was that they were happy. Life was perfect, and therefore they had to fall. To hear Dave tell it, Algonquin Lane was a veritable Eden, and some unknown force had slithered through their lives and pinned its crimes on them.

The media had bought it, too. People were less cynical then, resources fewer. Today the shock of two missing sisters would have dominated national news channels, an armchair detective story for those lucky parents who knew where their children were. Back then, the girls' disappearance had been a local story, generating only a pa.s.sing mention in a Time magazine piece on missing children. More national attention might have helped achieve what Miriam was always careful to think of as a resolution, but she supposed they'd been better off without the intrusion. Nowadays it would probably take a day for an amateur blogger to uncover the nature of Miriam's alibi, not to mention the debts that were weighing the family down. Thirty years ago the police could keep such secrets, while Equitable Trust had quietly paid off their first and second mortgages. (Children missing and presumed dead? Then you deserve a free house.) Yet Dave's version-spin, as it might be called now-had proved to be good for his business, not to mention her own career. Especially in that first year, Miriam could tell when it was her name, more than anything else, that had been the chief factor in attracting a new client. Midway through her spiel, while laying out what she could do for a motivated seller, how the firm could help with financing for pre-qualified buyers, she would catch one of the clients, usually the wife, inspecting her gravely. How do you go on? was the unspoken question. How do you not? was Miriam's unstated answer. What are my choices?

She sometimes wished Dave could see her now, working in a store not unlike the one he had run. He would appreciate the irony-Miriam, who had so loathed The Man with the Blue Guitar, selling the very same Oaxacan pottery that Dave had tried to persuade middle-cla.s.s Baltimore to buy long before it was ready for such wares. But she'd needed a job and, although she had little use for the gallery owner's taste, she liked him immediately. Joe Fleming was a jolly, flamboyantly gay man-when he was talking to customers. But Miriam had known from the moment she met him that it was an act, a cover for something dark and sad. Faux Joe, she called it now. "Here come some customers," she would call out to him. "Time to put on our faces, the ones we keep in the jars by the door." "I'll be right there, Miss Rigby," Joe replied, exaggerating his Texas drawl. And although Miriam didn't share Joe's taste, she was superb at selling the things he stocked. Her secret was that she really didn't give a s.h.i.t. With her good posture and her marvelous figure still intact, her dark hair shot through with wiry strands of silver, she had a reserved, cool manner that whipped shoppers into a frenzy of buying, as if this might win her approval, prove their taste equal to hers.

It was quiet in the shop this morning. The s...o...b..rds had started migrating north; the frenzy generated by Easter was still a week away. Miriam had first arrived in San Miguel de Allende in Easter Week 1989, completely by accident. Before, Easter had been a secular holiday to her, more about the baskets that she a.s.sembled so painstakingly, the elaborate egg hunts that Dave staged in the yard. Neither one of them had grown up in observant homes; Miriam was "Jewish" and Dave was "Lutheran" in the same way that she was German and he was a Scot. And while many had counseled a return to religion as a way of coping with her grief, Miriam had even less use for it after the girls disappeared. "Faith explains nothing," she told her parents. "It simply asks you to wait for an explanation that may or may not come after you die."