What The Dead Know Part 15

He pushed the papers away with enough force that some skidded off the slick surface of his mahogany coffee table. A table that, he noticed now, in the presence of this vibrant young woman, was dusty and overwaxed.

"You can't imagine being through with something like this, can you? You think the juices can always be engaged. The old cliche is that warhorses react when they smell smoke. But does that mean the horse wants to go to war or that he wants to avoid it? I've always thought it might be the latter. I did some good work as a detective. When I retired, I made peace with the fact that this one case would remain open, that some things cannot be known. I even-don't laugh-thought about supernatural explanations. Alien abductions. Why not?"

"But if there are answers to be had..."

"In my gut I feel that this is going to prove to be a hoax, an ugly waste of everyone's time and energy. I grieve for Miriam, flying back here, being forced to contemplate the one thing she seldom allowed herself to believe. Dave was the one who clung to hope, and it killed him. It was Miriam who could accept reality, who found a way to survive and get on with her life, diminished as it was."

"Your gut-that's what we need. In the room with me, making eye contact with her. The commissioner says he'll talk to you further about this, if it will make a difference."

Willoughby walked to the window. It was overcast and cool, even by March's temperamental standards. Still, he could play golf if he wanted to. Golf, the game one never perfects, the game that reminds you every time how human you are, how flawed. He had always said he would never play, never be drawn into the country-club life that was practically his birthright, but in the empty days of retirement he had fallen into it, and now he was stuck. He'd been forty-five when he retired. Who retires at forty-five?

A failure.

He hadn't meant to be a career police. The plan, long ago, had been to go into police work for a mere five years or so, then switch to the state's attorney's office, run for attorney general as the candidate who knew the law at every level, maybe even take a run at governor one day. As a young man, fresh out of UVA law school, he had plotted his future with that kind of confidence-five-year plans, ten-year plans, twenty-year plans. Then he became a murder police at age thirty and decided to stay a little longer, maybe work a famous case or two to boost his profile. Within that first year, he caught the Bethany case. He stayed another five years, then another ten.

It wasn't only because of the Bethany case, not exactly. But justice seemed less and less important to him. The courtroom wasn't a place for answers. It was the world of epilogues, a stage setting where the players a.s.sembled the exact same facts, fitting them together-how had this young woman put it? Yes, like Legos. Here's my version, here's his version. Which appeals to you the most? Legos. There were an infinite number of ways to put them together. He thought of the downtown library at Christmastime, where the windows were filled with magnificent Lego constructions made by local architectural firms. He thought about how carelessly he had a.s.sumed he would walk his own children, then grandchildren, past those windows. But his wife couldn't have children, as it turned out. "You can adopt," Dave had told him, and Willoughby had said unthinkingly, "But you never know what you're going to get."

Dave, to his credit, had said only, "No one ever does, Chet." The debt to Dave weighed on him still, and it was not paid, it would never be paid. His one effort to repay it had resulted in this debacle-Miriam on a plane, the detectives a.s.suming that science was on their side, that when all else failed they would get a subpoena and prove she was a liar, via her blood or her teeth-or her mother's DNA. Yes, it would be better for everyone if this woman's story could be debunked before Miriam arrived tonight.

"I'll accompany you," he said at last. "I won't go in, but I'll watch and listen, and you can consult me as you need to. But I'll need some lunch, and then you better get some caffeine into me. This is going to be a long afternoon, and I'm used to enjoying a nice postprandial nap."

He knew he was giving her something to ridicule, with that postprandial bit. She would probably repeat that around the department later. "He couldn't say 'after lunch' like a normal person-he had to say 'postprandial.'" But that had always been part of his police persona. He had deliberately allowed other police to take the p.i.s.s out of him every now and then, to give them reasons to mock his grandiosity, his manners.

Their hostility to him, their suspicion of his motives in being a police, had always puzzled him. The best detectives loved what they did and were proud of it. They, too, could make more money doing other things, but they had chosen police work. Chet was simply doing the same thing, and his love was purer still. Yet they never got that. In the end they just couldn't trust the guy who didn't need the paycheck. This red-cheeked girl was no different. Right now she required his help, or thought she did. But when it was all over, she'd mock him behind his back. So be it. He would do this for Dave-and Miriam.

He wondered how she had aged, how much gray was in her dark hair, if Mexico had weathered that lovely olive skin.

CHAPTER 29.

The blankness of her pa.s.sport reminded Miriam how immobile she had been for the last sixteen years, barely moving out of San Miguel, much less traveling beyond Mexico's borders. She hadn't, in fact, flown since long before 9/11, but she wasn't sure she would have noted the changes if she had not been primed to look for them. Customs in DallasFort Worth had probably never been a particularly pleasant experience in the most hopeful of times. She wasn't surprised at how rudely she was treated, or how they peered at her, then the photo on the pa.s.sport, which was due to expire in a year. She had become a U.S. citizen in 1963 because it simplified everything. Contrary to what people thought, citizens.h.i.+p wasn't conferred automatically upon marriage. If it hadn't been for the girls, she might never have changed her citizens.h.i.+p. Even in 1963 she had a sense that she wasn't meant to be an "American," as residents of the United States so blithely called themselves, as if no other country in the hemisphere existed. But she took on that ident.i.ty for her family's sake.

"What's the nature of your visit in the United States?" the immigration agent asked in a rapid monotone. She was black, forty-something, and so bored by her job that it seemed an enormous effort for her to rest her considerable bulk on the high, padded stool afforded her in the little booth.

"Uh..." It was only a split second of hesitation, but it seemed to be the excitement the immigration official had been longing for, the off-kilter answer that her ears were trained to pick up. Suddenly the woman's spine was straight, her eyes sharp.

"What's the nature of your visit?" she repeated, her voice now inflected. Vi-sit.

"Why, I-" Miriam remembered just in time that she was not required to tell the story of her life, standing here in immigration. She did not have to tell this woman that her children had been missing and presumed murdered for thirty years, much less that now, against all hope, one of them might be alive. She did not have to tell her about the affair with Baumgarten, the divorce, the move to Texas, the move to Mexico, Dave's death. She did not have to explain why she became a U.S. citizen, or why she had reverted to her maiden name after the divorce, or even why she had chosen to settle in San Miguel de Allende. Her life belonged to her still, at least for now. That could change, in the next twenty-four hours, and she could become public property once again.

All she had to say was, "Personal. A family matter. A relative was in a car accident."

"I'm sorry," the woman said. "That's awful."

"It's not serious," Miriam a.s.sured her, gathering her bags and moving on to the domestic terminal, where she had a numbing four hours to kill before the flight to Baltimore.

"IT'S NOT SERIOUS," the sergeant had told her the evening before, when she had recovered from the shock. Like someone thrown into deep, cold water, Miriam had been disoriented and stunned, her instincts overwhelmed. It had taken several moments for her to center herself, to do the natural thing and head for the surface, to break through to the place where she could breathe again. "The car accident, I mean," the man clarified. "Obviously, the claims she's making are very serious."

"I'll have to fly all day, but I could be back there by tomorrow night if I leave first thing," she said. She was weeping, but it was the kind of crying that didn't impede her voice, her thoughts. Her mind was flipping through her contacts in San Miguel, people who could and would do her favors. There was one particularly good hotel where the management was used to catering to rich types, with their sudden whims. They could probably book her ticket. Money was no object.

"It really would be better if you waited...We're not sure, in fact-"

"No, no, I could never wait." Then she got it. "You think she might be a liar?"

"We think she's d.a.m.n odd, but she knows some things that only someone with intimate knowledge of the case could have, and we are developing some new leads, but it's all very tentative."

"So even if she's not my daughter, she almost certainly knows something about her. And what of Sunny? What has she said about her sister?"

A pause, the kind of grave pause that told her the man on the other end of the phone was a parent. "She was killed soon after they were taken. According to this woman."

In sixteen-plus years of living in Mexico, Miriam had never once suffered a stomach ailment. But at that moment she felt the sharp, stabbing gut pain that was the hallmark of turista. Of all the things she had allowed herself to imagine for thirty years-the discovery of a grave, an arrest, the end of the story and yes, in some secret chamber of her heart, the impossible possibility of reunion-this had never occurred to her. One, but not the other? She felt as if her body might break down under the strain of trying to harbor such polarized feelings. Heather, alive, and the promise of answers after so many years. Sunny, dead, and the horror of answers after so many years. She glanced at her expression in the tin-framed mirror over the primitive pine buffet, expecting to see it bifurcated, the mask of comedy and tragedy combined in one face. But she looked as she usually did.

"I'll be there. As soon as humanly possible."

"That's your choice, of course. But you might want to let us check out a few of these leads. I've got a detective in Georgia, working on something. I'd hate for you to come all this way-"

"Look, there are only two possibilities. One is that this is my daughter, in which case I cannot get there soon enough. The other is that this is someone who knows something about my daughter and is exploiting the knowledge for whatever reason. If that's so, I want to confront her. Besides, I'll know. The moment I see her, I'll know."

"Still, a day won't change much, and if we should discredit her..." He didn't want her to come, for whatever reason, not yet, which only strengthened Miriam's resolve to be there as soon as possible. Dave was dead, she was in charge. She would behave as he would, if he were still around. She owed him that much.

Now, not even twenty-four hours later, wheeling her luggage past the hideous shops in the airport, Miriam was rethinking her cert.i.tude. What if she didn't know? What if her desire to see her daughter alive tainted her maternal instinct? What if maternal instinct was bulls.h.i.+t? There had always been those eager to disavow Miriam's motherhood, people who unthinkingly and unfeelingly demoted her because she had no biological claim on the children she was raising. What if they were right and Miriam was missing some key sense? Did the very fact that she had bonded so thoroughly with children who were not her biological kin prove how suggestive she was by nature? She remembered a cat they had owned, a superb calico mouser. Spayed, the cat had never thrown a litter. But one day she had discovered a little stuffed seal of Heather's, a repulsive thing made of actual seal fur, a gift from Dave's clueless mother. If the seal hadn't come from his mother, Dave never would have allowed Heather to keep it; he had made Miriam get rid of her beaver coat, a remnant of her Canadian life, pa.s.sed down from her grandmother, and far more defensible. But all sorts of exceptions were made for Florence Bethany. The cat, Eleanor, discovered the seal and adopted it, dragging it around by the neck as she might have carried her own kitten, endlessly was.h.i.+ng it, hissing at anyone who tried to take it from her. Eventually, of course, she ruined it, her wet, rough tongue removing all the hair until it was something truly hideous, a fetal bit of canvas.

What if Miriam's instincts were on a par with the calico mouser's? Having learned to love another woman's children as her own, was she capable of claiming any child, if she wanted to believe badly enough? Was she going to grab a stuffed seal by the neck and pretend it was her kitten?

In the year before she disappeared, Sunny had asked more and more questions about her "real" mother. She had been a typical adolescent at the time, so moody and temperamental that the family called her Stormy, and she kept tiptoeing up to the edge of the story, then retreating. She wanted to know. She wasn't ready to know. "Was it a one-car accident?" she asked. "What caused it? Who was driving?" The sweet, polite stories they had told for so long were now lies, plain and simple, and neither Miriam nor Dave knew how to navigate that change. Lying was the greatest sin in a teenager's eyes, the only excuse needed to reject all parental rules and strictures. If they had armed Sunny with the evidence of their deceit and hypocrisy, she would have been impossible. But, eventually, she would have to know, if only because there was an object lesson in her mother's mistakes, a reminder of how fatal it can be not to confide in a parent, to be proud in the wake of a mistake. If Sally Turner had been able to go to her parents in her time of need, then Sunny and Heather might never have come to be the Bethany girls. And as much as Miriam hated that idea, she knew that it would have been for the best. Not because of biology but because if the girls' mother had lived, they might have lived, too.

The police had looked long and hard into the father's family, but his few remaining relatives seemed to neither know nor care what had happened to that violent young man's offspring. He was an orphan, and the aunt who raised him had disapproved of Sally as much as Estelle and Herb had disapproved of him. Leonard, or Leo. Something like that. It was impossible to single out any indignity in the aftermath of the girls' disappearance, but Miriam had disliked the keen interest in the girls' parentage even more than the probing into her licentiousness. And Dave, who usually wanted every avenue explored, even the most crackpot theories, had been driven insane by that line of inquiry. "They are our daughters," he said to Chet repeatedly. "This has nothing to do with the Turners, or that idiot who did nothing more than a stray dog might have done. You're wasting your time." He was almost hysterical on the subject.

Once, years earlier, someone-a friend until this incident, which revealed that the person was not a friend and had never been one-had asked Miriam if the children could be Dave's, biologically, if he had impregnated the Turners' daughter during some long, clandestine affair and they had all conspired to concoct this elaborate story when she died, from whatever cause. Miriam had gotten used to the fact that no one would ever see a likeness between her and the girls, but she found it strange that this woman thought she could see Dave in them. Yes, his hair was light, but bushy and curly. Yes, his skin was fair, but his eyes were brown, his frame completely different. Yet, time and time again, people had said, Oh, the girls favor their father, which created a moment beyond awkward, for Miriam did not want to be put in the position of disavowing the girls in their hearing, but nor could she bear for the misinformation to stand. They are like me, she wanted to say. They are so like me. They are my daughters, and I have shaped them. They will be better versions of me, strong and more self-aware, capable of getting what they want without feeling selfish or greedy, the way women of my generation did.

Four hours. Four hours to kill in an airport and then almost three hours for the flight itself, and she had already been traveling for almost eight hours-up at 6:00 A.M. for the car, arranged by Joe, that took her to the local airport, then a long delay in Mexico City. There were good books in the airport bookstore, but she could not imagine focusing on any of them, and the magazines seemed too trivial, too outside her existence. She didn't even know who most of the actresses were, living as she did without a satellite dish. In face and figure, they looked shockingly alike to Miriam, as indistinguishable from one another as Madame Alexander dolls. The headlines screamed of personal matters-engagements, divorces, births. Give Chet credit, she thought. He had kept so much from local media. How docile reporters had been, how circ.u.mspect. Now the whole story would come out-the adoption, her affair, their money woes. Everything.

It still might, Miriam realized. It still might. Today's world would never allow this reunion, if it proved to be that, remain private. It was almost enough to make her hope that the woman in Baltimore was a liar. But she couldn't sustain the wish. She would give up everything-the truth about herself, ugly and unpleasant as it was, the truth about Dave and how she had treated him-she would trade it all, without a second thought, to see one of her daughters again.

She scooped up an armful of tabloids, deciding to think of them as homework, the future text of her life.

CHAPTER 30.

"Do you think this will finish it?" Heather asked, staring out the car window. She had been humming under her breath since they got in the car, a hum that had risen to a high-pitched drone when Kay took the entrance to the Beltway. It wasn't clear to Kay if she was aware of what she was doing.

"Finish it?"

"Will it be over, once I tell them everything?"

Kay was never glib, even about the smallest matters, and this question struck her as particularly grave. Will it be over? Gloria hadn't bothered to provide that information when she called and asked Kay-told her, really, issuing orders as if Kay worked for her, as if she were the one who'd been doing all the favors and Kay was in her debt-to bring Heather to the Public Safety Building by 4:00 P.M. And now they were running late because Heather had fussed so over her clothes. She'd been as petulant as Grace dressing for school, and almost as impossible to satisfy. Ultimately, she settled on a pale blue b.u.t.ton-down and a stretchy tweed skirt, which worked, in spite of itself, with her clunky black shoes, the only items of her own wardrobe that she was still willing to wear. All this bother seemed funny to Kay, because Heather didn't give off the vibe of someone who thought about her appearance. A shame, really, because she was such a striking woman, blessed with things that only nature could bestow-high cheekbones, the kind of willowy frame that age never thickened, good skin.

"Nothing's changed with the boy, if that's what you mean. His condition's improving steadily. Gloria seems confident there won't be serious charges in connection with the collision."

"I wasn't really thinking about him."

"Oh." It bothered Kay, how seldom Heather thought of anyone but herself. But that would be the logical consequence of what had happened-a.s.suming that Kay's theories were right. Working from the scant details that Heather had meted out so far, Kay had decided that Stan Dunham had taken both girls but killed Sunny because, at fifteen, she was too old to interest him. He had kept Heather until she, too, ceased to be of use to a pedophile, then retained her for a few extra years until Heather was sufficiently traumatized to keep his secrets. How? Kay didn't want to think about that. Clearly, he had turned her into his accomplice somehow, made her feel as if she were a criminal, too. Or simply left her so racked with fear that she would never consider telling anyone what had happened. Kay was not troubled, as the detectives seemed to be, by the fact that Heather had not tried to get away or tell anyone what was happening to her during those six or so years. Perhaps he told her that her parents were dead, or even that they'd arranged for him to take the girls. Children were so suggestible, so malleable. Even Heather's continuing reluctance to tell the full story was logical to Kay. Her new ident.i.ty, whatever it was, had been central to her survival. Why should she entrust anyone with it-particularly men and women who had worked in the same department as her abductor?

"Do you think they know anything new?" Heather asked.

"New?"

"Maybe they found my sister's body. I told them where it was."

"Even if they did-and I think that might have made the news, since it would be hard to excavate an old grave without drawing attention to it-it would take weeks to identify her remains."

"Really? Wouldn't this be a high-priority case, something they could rush through?" She seemed a little insulted not to be given the treatment she thought was her due.

"Only on television." Through her work with the House of Ruth, the same channels in which she'd become acquainted with Gloria, Kay had gotten to know a forensic anthropologist from College Park, who was a rueful guide to the pedestrian restraints, mainly budgetary, that kept her from producing the miracles the public expected. "There are some things they can tell right away-"

"Like what?"

Kay realized she wasn't sure. "Well, certain...um, damage to the body. Blunt-force trauma or gunshot. But also the gender, I think, the approximate age."

"How do they do that?"

"I don't know exactly. But, obviously, skeletons change in p.u.b.erty. However, if your old dentist is still around, he'll be able to ID your sister pretty quickly. I understand that dentists are very good at recognizing their own work."

"John Martielli, D.D.S.," Heather said, her voice almost dreamy. "His office was upstairs, above the drugstore. There were Highlights magazines, of course. Goofus and Gallant. If we didn't have cavities-and we never had cavities-we were allowed to go around the corner and buy whatever we liked from the bakery, no matter how much white sugar it had in it."

"You've never had a cavity?" Kay thought of her own poor, tortured mouth. Just this year she'd undergone the tedium of having every silver filling replaced, and now there were crowns aging out, the result of cracked teeth that Kay considered the legacy of her divorce. She had ground her teeth until two sheared off, the bits coming up with the granola bar she was eating at the time. The crowns had led to an infection and a root ca.n.a.l, and the dentist thought she might need additional surgery still. She knew that her dental woes weren't her fault, but the problems in her mouth made her feel vaguely unclean, unhygienic.

"No. Even when I didn't go to the dentist for years-because I didn't have health insurance in my twenties-my teeth were perfect. Now I go every six months." She bared her teeth, showing them off. Good teeth, great bone structure, a naturally slender frame, lovely skin-if Kay hadn't known Heather's story, she would have hated her a little.

"Could we stop?" Heather asked, holding her stomach as if she had a cramp.

"We're running late as it is, but if you're carsick or need something to eat-"

"I thought we could go to the mall."

"The mall?"

"Security Square?" Kay glanced at Heather. It was hard to make eye contact while driving, especially when one was trying to merge onto the Beltway, but she had learned from dealing with Grace that eye contact was overrated. She got more information out of her daughter when they were staring straight ahead, through the same winds.h.i.+eld. The mall was one exit past where Heather had been picked up Tuesday night. "Is that where you were trying to go, all along?"

"Not consciously. But maybe I was. At any rate, I need to go there now, before I do this. Please, Kay? It's not the worst thing in the world, being late."

"I'm not as worried about the detectives as I am about Gloria. She doesn't value anyone's time but her own."

"I'll call her on your cell, explain we're running behind." Without waiting for Kay's agreement, Heather grabbed the phone from the cup holder between the seats and used its received-calls log to find Gloria's number and call her back. She manipulated the phone with ease, as comfortable with gadgetry as Seth or Grace. "Gloria? It's Heather. We're just getting on the road. Kay's ex-husband was late picking up the kids, and we couldn't very well leave them there, could we?" She didn't give Gloria time to reply. "See you in a few."

What a brilliant excuse, Kay thought. She pinned it on someone that no one knows, that no one would think to question.

It took a split second, but the larger implications of this observation seemed to vibrate beneath her tires as she merged onto the long, sweeping exit to Security Boulevard.

"I THOUGHT THINGS got smaller as you aged," Heather said. "This seems larger. Did they expand it?"

They were standing in a corridor where, according to Heather, the movie theater, all two screens, had once been. For a Sat.u.r.day the mall was severely underpopulated, and while it had some of the usual offerings-Old Navy, a chain music store, a Sears, and a Hecht's-the other stores were unknown to Kay, and there was a general sense of abandonment. In one corner a former department store-Hoschild's, Heather insisted-had been deconstructed, its walls torn away so that only its escalators remained. These now took shoppers to an Asian food court. There must be a big Asian population in the area, for the name Seoul Plaza had been affixed to the facade of the mall's south end. Kay found the Seoul Plaza part vaguely hopeful, a sign of how things changed and adapted. It was exciting, on one level, that this section of Baltimore County needed such a specialty store. But she wasn't much of a fan of malls in particular, and this one was so forlorn, so seedy and forgotten.

She wondered what it looked like to Heather.

"You could smell the Karmelkorn even here," Heather was saying now. "It filled this central area. That's where we were supposed to meet that day."

Heather began to walk, head down, as if there were clues to follow. Upon reaching the mall's atrium, she turned right. "The organ store was up here, near the bookstore. The sewing supplies-Singer, not Jo-Ann-were the other way, along with Harmony Hut. We were supposed to meet our father at the health food store, the GNC, at five-thirty. He bought brewer's yeast there, and sesame candy. It was pretty here then. Full of people, festive."

It was as if Heather were prepping, reviewing information for a test. But if she was Heather Bethany, why would she worry about having the right answers? And if she wasn't, she must see that the mall was so changed that no one could check her memories of it, contradict her recollections?

"Mall security," she said, stopping to inspect a gla.s.sed-in booth with uniformed men staring at a variety of screens, and Kay wondered if she was thinking that such men might have saved her, thirty years ago. "This is where Karmelkorn-No, no, no. I'm turned around. The new wing, with Hecht's, threw me off. It's not that the mall has gotten larger but that I was confused about the layout, transposed the two corridors."

She began moving so fast that Kay almost had to jog to keep up with her. "The movie theaters would have been down here," she said, skidding to a stop, then turning around, her pace picking right back up. "And if we go right here-yes, now it makes sense. The place where those escalators are, that wasn't Hoschild's but the J. C. Penney, which was still under construction that weekend. Here-this was the organ store, where Mr. Pincharelli worked on weekends."

"Here" was now something called Kid-Go-Round, a store that apparently catered to children who needed the equivalent of prom clothes, for weddings and the like. Next door was a store called Touch of the Past, which Kay found eerie until she realized that it sold Negro League memorabilia, expensive jerseys for teams such as the Homestead Grays and the Atlanta Black Crackers.

"Mr. Pincharelli?" Kay asked.

"The music teacher at Rock Glen Junior High. Sunny had the biggest crush on him for a while."

Heather stood transfixed, rocking slightly, humming again as she had in the car, hugging herself as if she were cold. "Look at those dresses," she said. "Flower girls, junior attendants. Did you have that kind of wedding?"

"Not quite," Kay said, smiling at the memory. "We married outdoors, in the backyard of a friend's house on the Severn River, and I wore flowers in my hair. It was the eighties," she added with a note of apology. "And I was all of twenty-three."

"I'm never going to marry, not for real." Heather's tone was not regretful or self-pitying, merely factual.

"Well, then at least you'll never have to get divorced," Kay said.

"My parents divorced, didn't they? I didn't get that at first. They split up. Do you think it's my fault?"

"Your fault?"

"Well, not my fault, obviously. But a consequence of what...happened. Do you think grief drove them apart?"