What The Dead Know Part 9

And Miriam had been waiting for the girls to be found, she realized, not just because she was desperate to know what had happened but because she'd been planning to leave Dave once this was settled. The tragedy of their daughters-the blame of it, the weight of it-was marital property as surely as the house and the furniture and the store. She needed to know the whole story so that it could be divided between them, fifty-fifty, fair and square. But what if the ending never came? Did she have to stay with Dave? Even if she were to blame for her daughters' deaths-and Miriam, in her darkest moments, could not believe that any G.o.d, in any belief system, would kill two children to punish a philandering mother, and if there were such a G.o.d, she wanted no part of him or her or it-did she have to serve a life sentence in this marriage? It had been deadening enough before, leavened only by their joy in the girls. How long did she have to stay? How much did she owe Dave?

She studied her reflection in the window above the sink. A woman must have a window over her sink, her mother had said. Washing dishes is so boring there must be a view. To her knowledge it was the only demand her mother had ever uttered. Certainly, she had never questioned that it was the woman who would wash the dishes and make the meals and clean the house, much less seek a place for herself outside the house. Women of Miriam's generation were beginning to ask for so much, but her mother, miserable as she was living in Ottawa, had asked for nothing but a window, and Miriam had followed suit. Here, during daylight hours, she could see the large, overgrown-verging-on-wild yard. The wildness was a carefully cultivated illusion. Miriam had tended to her yard as she had reared her children, allowing it to follow its instincts, respecting what was there-honeysuckle, mint, jack-in-the-pulpit-and not trying to force things that were never meant to be, such as roses or hydrangeas. The things she added had been compatible, un.o.btrusive, perennials capable of thriving in the shade.

But once the sun went down, all the window provided was one's own face. The woman that Miriam saw looked exhausted, yet still attractive. She would have no problem finding a new man. In fact, men seemed more drawn to her than ever in the past year. Chet clearly had a crush on her, and not only because she was a damsel in distress. The knowledge of Miriam's affair, the secret that he had continued to safeguard, excited him. She was a bad woman. And Willoughby, despite being a detective, didn't seem to have a lot of firsthand experience with bad women.

Other men, not privy to what Willoughby knew, were attracted to Miriam by the palpable sense of doom and damage, the exhausted eyes that clearly said, I'm out of the game. It was frightening, really, how many men responded to damage in a woman. Yes, she could easily find another man. But she didn't want another man. What she wanted was an excuse to leave, a definitive reason to go upstairs, pack a bag and drive away, without being seen as the cold, unnatural woman who had abandoned her husband when he needed her most. The husband who had forgiven her, so generously, so unstintingly. Then again, how magnanimous was a gesture if one were constantly aware of its magnanimity?

She would give it six more months. That would take them to October. But October had been so hard on Dave last fall-the beautiful weather, Halloween, with neighborhood children in their costumes. November, December? But the holidays were more painful still. January brought Sunny's birthday, and then it would be March again, the second anniversary, with Heather's birthday the following week. There would never be a right time to leave, Miriam thought. There would just be a time. Soon.

She imagined herself on the highway, heading to...Texas. She knew a girl from her college days who had settled in Austin and raved about its free-and-easy lifestyle. Miriam saw herself in her car, driving west, then south through Virginia, through the long Shenandoah Valley, past the destinations they had visited with the girls-Luray Caverns, Skyline Drive, Monticello-deeper and deeper, all the way to Abingdon and into Tennessee. She experienced a chill. Ah, right. Abingdon was the locale of another alleged sighting. A well-intentioned one, but those clueless busybodies bothered Miriam more than the out-and-out hoaxes did.

Of all the things that she had cause to resent, Miriam most despised how her private tragedy had become a public one, something that others claimed to be affected by. Look at these reporters today, pretending they had a clue how she felt. The deluded witnesses were just another variation, people seeking ownership, as if the "Bethany girls" were a public resource or treasure, too great for one family to own, like the Hope Diamond down in the Smithsonian. Of course, that gem was said to be cursed.

The Hope Diamond made her think of that huge diamond that Richard Burton gave Elizabeth Taylor. Miriam remembered watching the once-glorious couple on Here's Lucy, with Sunny and Heather. Lucille Ball always made Miriam slightly anxious; a beautiful woman should not have to be so silly to get attention. Beauty was its own excuse for being-just look at Elizabeth Taylor if you doubted that fact. But the girls loved Lucy as if she were a cherished aunt, and the comedienne had raised them in a sense, amusing them many an afternoon, on the fuzzy feed from one of the Washington stations. Even the girls recognized that the current nighttime series couldn't begin to touch the magic of the original, but they watched out of loyalty. In the show Miriam remembered, Ball tried on Taylor's ring and couldn't get it off. High jinks ensued, with lots of popping eyes and wide mouths.

People tried on Miriam's pain in that way, modeled it for her, almost as if they expected her to be flattered by their interest. But they never had any trouble shedding it when the time came. They plucked it off and handed it back to her, continuing with their blessedly uneventful lives.

CHAPTER 18.

It had taken a lot of begging and promising and negotiating, but she finally got permission to attend a party. She had argued-well, not argued, a voice raised in anger was considered unacceptable-she had said that it would appear odd, forever saying no to the invitations at school. She was supposed to be a kid like any other, and kids went to parties. Uncle and Auntie, as she had been instructed to call them in public, were keen not to seem odd to others. That made sense to her, given all the secrets they were keeping and all the lies they were telling, but she couldn't understand how they managed to hide their oddness from themselves. How could they not know how weird they were, how out of step in every way? Outside the house it was 1976, the year of the Bicentennial, in the middle of a decade that had proved that anything could happen, even in a small town such as this. A war had ended, a president had been toppled, because people had demanded change. Spoke for it, marched for it, died for it in some cases. She was not thinking of the soldiers in Vietnam. She never thought about them. She was thinking about Kent State, an event she wished she'd paid more attention to when it happened, but she'd been so much younger then. It wasn't the kind of thing that a little girl could understand, much less care about.

She cared about it now, though. In the library she had found a copy of Time magazine with the photo of the girl crouching by the boy. The girl was a runaway, dislocated, not where she was supposed to be, and she had wandered into history. The photograph became a kind of promise: She could run away. She could find history. And if she found history, if she could do something large and important enough, then maybe she could be forgiven.

But, for now, she was happy to be in a bas.e.m.e.nt party room in a house in town, waiting to see if anyone would call her number for Five Minutes in Heaven. The game had started contentiously, not because some girls didn't want to play-everyone had been eager to play-but because there was much disagreement on how long couples should stay in the closet. Some said two, citing no less an authority than Are You There G.o.d? It's Me, Margaret, while others said it should be seven, because that sounded right: Seven Minutes in Heaven. "We'll split the difference," decreed the hostess, Kathy. A popular girl but a nice one, she wielded her power with grace. If Kathy said it was okay to play Five Minutes in Heaven, then it was definitely okay.

That was something else that Uncle and Auntie didn't know about the world right outside their door: s.e.x was everywhere, even here, even among the very young, especially among the very young. Doctor, Spin the Bottle, now Five Minutes (or Two or Seven) in Heaven. s.e.x came first, well before drinking and drugs, although drugs were largely disdained here. Too hippie-ish. Her cla.s.smates were groping their way into adolescence, literally and figuratively.

She was the only one having full-out intercourse in a feather bed, however. She was pretty sure of that, not that she dared to compare notes. If she told anyone about life at home, they would take her away, and that might actually be worse.

It was hard to think about kissing in daylight, on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon. s.e.x was a nighttime activity, grim and silent, in a house where everyone pretended not to hear the squeak of the springs, the way the bedstead swayed, pressing against the wall with a muted thump, like waves lapping a pier. Waves against a pier...She was in Annapolis, at the clam festival. She was eight. She wore orange-and-pink culottes. She didn't like clams, but she liked the festival. Everyone was happy, back when she was eight.

By day she was a distant cousin, arrived from Ohio, saddled with a name she truly hated, Ruth. So plain, so stark that name. Ruth. If she had to have a new one, why not Cordelia or Geraldine, one of the names that Anne of Green Gables had chosen for herself? But Uncle explained that the choices were limited, and Ruth was the best he could do. Ruth was a real girl, once upon a time, a girl who lived to be only three or four, then burned up in a fire with her whole family in a place called Bexley. Ruth had a different birthday than she did, so they put her in the wrong grade, which she had expected to be boring and repet.i.tive. But her new school, Shrine of the Little Flower, was actually harder than her old one. She wasn't sure if that was because of the nuns or the fact that the cla.s.s was small, maybe both. With so much schoolwork, she didn't have time to learn all the things she should know about her new self, and she worried that someone was going to ask her questions about Ohio that she couldn't answer-the capital, the state flower, the state bird. But no one ever did. Her new cla.s.smates had grown up together and had little experience dealing with strangers. And they'd been instructed explicitly not to talk to Ruth about the horrible things that had happened to her family back in Ohio.

One girl, someone who would have been called a spastic back home, although that term didn't appear to be in use here, asked her about the cigars.

"Cigars?"

"From the burns?"

"Oh. Scars." She needed to think for only a second. Lying was becoming second nature to her. "They're where you can't see them."

She regretted this, because it got back to the boys from Little Flower and they had been gossiping about who might be the first to see Ruth's secret scars. Even today, when Five Minutes in Heaven was proposed, she saw Jeffrey point to her and punch Bill in the arm, saying in a hoa.r.s.e stage whisper, "Maybe you'll get to see Ruth's scars." She knew that Jeffrey liked her, that his teasing was a form of flirtation, but she was too tired to care. If the girls at Little Flower didn't know what to do with a new girl, the boys did, or thought they did. They liked her, mysterious, forbidden Ruth, with her tragic history that no one was supposed to mention. She worried that they could smell all the s.e.x on her, despite the long showers she took morning and night, earning her harsh lectures about the limits of well water and the cost of natural gas.

"Forty-seven!" Bill called out. That was her number. The other kids whooped, as they did each time. She walked to the closet with as much dignity as possible, knowing that Bill was capering after her, making faces at his buddies behind her back. Again, this was what all the confident boys did, she reminded herself.

The closet was really a pantry, where Kathy's mom put up her summer canning. Tomatoes and peppers and peaches stared down at them. They made her think of the jars in a horror movie, of the brains floating in brine in Young Frankenstein. Abbie. Abbie Normal! That would be a good fake name. Auntie put up food, too, and made wonderful jams and preserves. Apple, peach, plum, cherries-No, don't think about the cherry tree. There was a large cooler on the floor, and they sat on it, hip to hip, shy and awkward.

"What do you want to do?" Bill asked.

"What do you want to do?" she countered.

He shrugged, as if the situation bored him, as if he'd seen it all and done it all.

"Do you want to kiss me?" she ventured.

"Yeah, I guess."

His breath tasted of cake and potato chips, which was kind of pleasant. He parted his lips but didn't try to put his tongue in her mouth. And he kept his hands to his sides, almost as if he were afraid to touch her.

"Nice," she said, being polite but also meaning it.

"Do you want to do it again?"

"Sure." They had five minutes.

This time he stuck the tiniest tip of his tongue between her lips and let it hang there, barely breathing, as if he expected her to object or push him away. Instead she had to concentrate on not widening her mouth reflexively and drawing his tongue in the rest of the way. She was well trained by now, expert in the techniques it took to speed through the nightly transaction. What would Ruth, the real Ruth, do, if she hadn't burned up in a fire when she was four years old? What would Ruth know, how would she act? The tip of Bill's tongue rested on her lower lip, like a fleck of food or a strand of hair she wanted to brush away. But she let it stay.

"What else do you want to do?" Bill asked, pulling back to breathe.

He didn't know, she realized. He had no idea of all the things that could be done, even in five minutes. For one moment she considered showing him, but she knew that would be disastrous. When their five minutes finally ended with the others pounding on the closet door, screaming at them to put back on the clothes that weren't even disheveled, Bill was still as ignorant as she wished she were. Then Kathy's mother called downstairs that it was time to go home, and she didn't have to call anyone's number.

"HOW WAS THE PARTY?" Uncle asked.

"Boring," she said, telling the truth, but a truth she knew that would make him happy. If the party were boring, maybe she wouldn't want to go to another one. He worried about her when she was out in public, without someone in the family watching her. He didn't quite trust her when she was out of the house. Besides, she liked to make him happy. In his own strange way, he was on her side, and no one else in the house really was, not even the dogs, who were rough and nasty, good only for muddying coats and tearing her tights.

"I thought I'd go outside," she said.

"Cold as it is?"

"Just around the property. Not far."

She walked to the orchard, to the cherry tree. This time of year, it was hard to say if one really saw buds or if it was just wishful thinking, a trick of the March dusk, creating gray-green shadows that looked like the promise of new life.

"I kissed a boy today," she told the tree, the twilight, the ground. No one was impressed, but the normalcy of it made her feel that maybe she could be normal again, that she could retrace her steps and get things right. One day.

She was Ruth, from Bexley, Ohio. Her whole family burned up in a fire when she was three or four. She had jumped out the second-floor window, breaking her ankle. That's why she was a grade behind where she should be, because of all the time in the hospital. No, she had not been left back. She just didn't get to do any schoolwork that year. And school was different in Ohio. That's why she didn't know some things she should know.

Yes, she had scars, but they weren't where you could see them, even when she wore a bathing suit.

PART V.

FRIDAY.

CHAPTER 19.

"I can't," she said. "I just can't."

Odd, the things that stuck with you from school. Infante hadn't been much of a student, but he'd liked history for a while there. In Jane Doe's hospital room Friday morning-and he was insisting on thinking of her as Jane Doe, now more than ever-Infante was reminded of something he once heard about Louis XIV. Or maybe XVI. The point was, he remembered how certain kings made their servants watch them dress, and that was supposed to establish their power. Dress and bathe and G.o.d knows what else. As a fourteen-year-old in Ma.s.sapequa, he hadn't bought it. Who looked less powerful than a naked man, or a guy taking a dump? But watching Jane D. do her thing this morning, the history lesson came back to him.

Which isn't to say she was disrobing for him-anything but. She was still in her hospital gown, her bony shoulders draped with a bright shawl. Yet she was ordering around Gloria and the hospital social worker, what's-her-name, in this very queenly fashion, acting as if he weren't in the room at all. If he didn't know the first thing about her-and, again, he was sticking by that notion-he would have diagnosed her a rich b.i.t.c.h, or a daddy's girl at the very least, someone used to getting her way. With men and women. These two were jumping, vying for the right to do things for her.

"My clothes-" she began, eyeing the outfit she had been wearing when she was admitted, and even Kevin could see why she wouldn't want to put them on again. They were sweat-type things, a loose top and yoga pants, the Under Armor brand that was so hot locally, and they were giving off a stale smell-not the hard-core acrid odor of a workout but that slept-in, lived-in-too-long kind of smell. He wondered how many miles she had driven in them before the accident. All the way from Asheville? Then how did you buy gas, with no billfold or cash? Could she have flung her wallet out of the car? Gloria kept trying to portray the events after the accident as pure panic, the faulty decisions made by adrenaline. But you could counter that it was all calculated, that she had fled the scene to give herself time to come up with a story.

A story that had been enlarged to include a cop-perpetrator when this woman learned that the state's attorney thought she should be grand juried or locked up. And sure enough, the state's attorney had blinked, agreed to let her stay out of jail as long as Gloria would vouch for her remaining in Baltimore. Infante had to admit, a person would have to be really b.a.l.l.sy to flee Gloria. She'd hunt the woman down for her fee alone.

"There's a Salvation Army over on Patapsco Avenue," said the social worker. Kay, that was it. "Really, they have some very nice things."

"Patapsco Avenue," Lady X said in a musing, remembering tone, a little arch to Infante's ears. "I think there was a discount seafood place up there, once upon a time. It's where my family bought crabs."

He jumped on that. "You came all the way over here to buy seafood, living in Northwest Baltimore?"

"My dad was big on bargains. Bargains and...idiosyncrasy. You know, why drive ten minutes for steamed crabs if you could go clear across the city, save a buck a dozen, and have a story to tell? Come to think of it, wasn't there a place around here that served deep-fried green-pepper rings dipped in powdered sugar?"

Kay shook her head. "I've heard people speak of them, but I've lived in Baltimore my whole life and never seen such a thing on any menu."

"Just because you don't see something doesn't mean it doesn't exist." She was queenly again, lifting her chin. "I sat in plain sight for years and no one ever saw me."

Good, she was finally in the neighborhood of where this conversation should have been going all along. "Your appearance wasn't altered at all?"

"Nice'n Easy took my hair two shades darker. I asked to be a redhead like Anne of Green Gables, but what I wanted was seldom of interest." She met his gaze. "I'm guessing you weren't much of an L. M. Montgomery fan."

"Who was he?" he asked obediently, knowing he was being set up, letting the trio of women laugh at him. He could afford such laughter-use it to his advantage, even. Let her think he was an idiot. Wouldn't it be great if Gloria went on the clothes-shopping mission with Kay? But he was never going to get that lucky. "Seriously-"

"I started to grow," she said, as if antic.i.p.ating where he was going. "And although everyone knew that I'd have to grow if I was still alive, I think that was part of the reason no one ever recognized me. That, and being just the one."

"Yeah, your sister. What happened to her? That would be a good place to start."

"No," she said. "It wouldn't be."

"Gloria said you had lots to say. About a cop, in fact. I was summoned here this morning on the understanding that you were ready to tell me everything."

"I can do the generalities. I'm still not sure I should deal in specifics, yet. I don't feel that you're on my side."

"You're saying you're a victim, a hostage held against her will, and you're implying that your sister was killed. Why wouldn't I be on your side?"

"See, there it is: You're saying. Not that I am but that I claim to be. Your skepticism makes it very hard for me to trust you. That, and the likelihood that you'll do everything you can to discredit a story that doesn't reflect well on one of your department's own."

She had hit a nerve there, but he wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of seeing how much it bugged him, how it had set off all sorts of alarms in the department. "It's a way of talking, that's all. Don't read so much into it."

She ran her right hand, the one that wasn't bandaged, through her hair, and held his gaze. Their game of visual chicken dragged on until she blinked, fluttering her eyelids as if exhausted. Yet he had the sense that she was simply allowing him the illusion of winning, that she could have gone much longer. Piece o' work, this one, a real piece o' work.

"I knew a girl-" she began, behind closed eyes.

"Heather Bethany? Penelope Jackson?"

"This was high school. While I was still with him."

"Where-"

"Later. In good time." Eyes open now, but trained on the wall to her left. "I knew a girl, and she was popular. A cheerleader, a good student. Sweet, though. The kind of girl that adults admired. She dated, a lot. Older boys, college boys. In-where this was-there was a lake, and kids went there on date nights to drink and make out. Her parents didn't want her to be in cars late at night, driving on those roads with inexperienced boys. So they made her a deal. If she would bring her dates home, to their house, they would respect her privacy. She and her date would have the rec room to themselves. There would be no curfew. Beer could be consumed, within reason. After all, they could have crossed the state line, where the drinking age was eighteen at the time. In the rec room, they could drink beer and watch television and know that-short of her screaming 'Fire!' or 'Rape!'-no parent would enter the room. Her parents would stay in their bedroom, two floors away, and respect her privacy. What do you think happened?"

"I don't know." Christ, I don't care. But he had to pretend that he did. This one drank up attention like water.

"She did everything. Everything. She perfected the art of the b.l.o.w. .j.o.b. She lost her virginity. Her parents thought they had figured it out so neatly, that they could give her freedom and she would be too inhibited to use it. They thought she wouldn't really take them at their word, that she would worry about them crossing the threshold. So here was this girl, this sweet, popular girl, all but starring in p.o.r.nos in her parents' rec room, and it didn't change her reputation one whit."

"Is this a story about you?"

"No. It's a story about perceptions, about what you get to be in public and what you are in private. Right now I'm a private person. Anonymous, unknown, ordinary. But when I start to tell you what happened to me, you're going to think I'm dirty. Nasty. You won't be able to help yourself. The cheerleader in the bas.e.m.e.nt can give out all the b.l.o.w. .j.o.bs she likes. But the little girl who doesn't try to escape from her captor and abuser, who gets raped every night, she's harder to understand. She must have liked it, if she didn't run away. Right? And that's without the guy being a cop on top of everything else."

"I'm a police," he said. "I don't blame victims."

"But you categorize them, right? You feel differently about, say, a woman beaten to death by her husband than you do about a drug dealer killed by a rival. That's just human nature. And you're human-right?" Kevin glanced over at Gloria. In his experience, she kept her clients on a tight leash, interrupting and directing interviews. But she was letting this one run the show. In fact, she seemed a little mesmerized by her. "I want to help you, but I want to preserve what little normalcy I have. I don't want to be the freak of the week on all those news channels. I don't want police officers poking around in my present life, talking to neighbors and coworkers and bosses."

"And friends? Family?"

"I don't have those."

"But you know we're trying to find your mother, Miriam, down in Mexico."

"Are you sure she's alive? Because-" She stopped herself.

"Because what? Because you think she's dead? Because you counted on her being dead?"

"Why don't you ever use my name when you speak to me?"