What The Dead Know Part 19

Miriam's knees buckled, and she started to cry, just a little. How to explain, in any language, why she behaved this way? She had come to Mexico in hopes that she could stop explaining once and for all. She had come to Mexico to escape the phone calls, the ones where no one ever spoke. ("Dave?" she yelled into the empty air. "Who is this? Why are you calling me?" Once, just once, she had forgotten herself and said "Honey?" only to hear a sharp intake of breath.) She had come to Mexico to start over, and here she was, trapped in the same old life. Amazing, the levels of pain, the subtle variations, even after more than a decade. Miriam lived every day with a dull, chronic ache, like some permanent nerve damage she had learned to compensate for because there was no surgical fix. But no matter how careful she was, no matter how tenderly she protected these compromised joints and tendons, there were things that made the pain flare up, sudden and searing. Anything could trigger memories, even new experiences such as this, which she sought out hoping for a context in which the girls could not insert themselves. She looked at the white peac.o.c.ks strutting across the lawn at a hotel in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and burst into tears for the children who would have been delighted by them.

But the beauty of a first-cla.s.s hotel, the whole point of paying seventy-five dollars a night when you could be just as comfortable for thirty, is that the staff is trained in unfaltering politeness. The senora must be tired after her long day of travel, the blond man told the hovering staff-in Spanish, yet Miriam could understand his Spanish, which was not as rapid, whose words did not run pell-mell into each other. She was escorted to a sparkling room, where a maid brought her fresh-squeezed orange juice. The maid then gave her a tour of the room's amenities. Nothing was too small, too trivial, to be explained. She indicated a rug on the floor. For your little feet. She showed her a bowl of fruit. In case you have hunger. And, at last, she placed a small pillow on the snowy white bed and urged her to lie down. For your little head, Miriam translated. For your little head.

Miriam pantomimed her desire for a gla.s.s of water, which would have to be distilled or purified, even in this s.h.i.+ning place. She then tried to ask if it was necessary to dress for dinner, if she could wear pants, going so far as to unzip her suitcase and show the uncrushable silk trousers packed on the top. Como no, the maid responded. Not why not but how not, Miriam noted. Another idiom to master.

"Tiene sueno?" the maid then asked, and Miriam started. But she was only being asked if she was sleepy, not if she had dreams.

She surrendered to the bed and when she awoke, night had fallen and the hotel lawn was full of people having drinks and dinner. She sipped a kir royale, nibbled toasted pine nuts, and tried to shut out the language she already understood, allowing only Spanish into her head and heart. She was here to learn new words, a new way of speaking, a new way of being. She had already learned a few things today, and been reminded of others she already knew. She would now have hunger, not be it. Use the first-person p.r.o.noun only for emphasis. And, most important of all, she would swap why for how. Como no?

CHAPTER 35.

"Barb, I lost my story!"

The cry, all too familiar at this time of the afternoon, came from the usual source, a messy desk in a corner of the newsroom, a desk piled so high with papers and reports that its occupant would have been virtually invisible if it weren't for her towering hairstyle. A tiny, formidably stylish woman, Mrs. Hennessey often lost her work on deadline, but seldom because of an actual computer crash or malfunction. Instead she had a habit of hiding her work in progress on the alternate screen or copying the entire story to a "save" key and then deleting it from the screen in front of her.

"Let me see, Mrs. Hennessey." Barb tried to swing the computer around on the pedestal that allowed it to be shared by two reporters, but Mrs. Hennessey had cunningly blocked the lazy Susan by piling reference books around it, so she seldom had to share. Barb tapped away, checking the usual traps, but Mrs. Hennessey was right for once: She really had lost her work. When Barb found its ghostly twin in the backup system, it was just a blank template with a story header and the date it had been created, nothing more.

"Did you save as you wrote?" she asked, knowing the answer.

"Well, I tabbed at the end of every paragraph."

"The tab key doesn't save. You have to execute the save command, Mrs. Hennessey."

"I don't know what you mean." Mrs. Hennessey had been around since G.o.d was a boy, to use a localism. A thirty-five-year employee of the Fairfax Gazette, she had started in the women's section, as it was then known, and fought her way into the news section, where she had covered the education beat for the last two decades. Her seniority was unmatched, if only because the paper's most promising reporters seldom stayed for more than two years. She also was rumored to be a Holocaust survivor, but her thick gold bangles hid whatever tattoos she might have. She was, in short, tough as nails, but she reverted to a kittenish, helpless quality when her computer let her down. Or, more correctly, when she let the computer down, refusing to take the simplest steps to protect her work.

"If you hit 'Function 2' every 'graph or so, then the computer will store a copy of your file and continue to update it. You never saved this work. As far as the computer's concerned, it doesn't exist. It can't save what it can't see."

"What do you mean, it can't see it? It's right there," she said, gesturing at the screen with her be-ringed fingers. "It was right there," she amended, given that the screen was blank. "I could see it. These machines are useless."

Barb always felt defensive on the computer system's behalf, flawed as she knew it to be. The Gazette, part of a small chain, had the incompatible habits of being progressive in its thinking and tight with its coffers, a combination that had brought them this dinosaur of a system, one that wasn't intended for newspaper work. "It's a tool, like anything else. When you used typewriters, there was no copy unless you inserted carbon paper. It's a poor craftsman who blames his tools."

The saying, one of her father's, came out of nowhere. As usual, she felt wistful and sad and anxious all at once, as if this wisp of an echo could unravel her life.

"What did you say to me?" Mrs. Hennessey's voice abandoned kitten and moved on to lioness. "You impertinent..." Here, she uttered some oath in German or Yiddish, Barb couldn't be sure. "I will have you fired. I will-" She clambered out of her chair and over the piles of reports she had used to create a makes.h.i.+ft barrier around her desk, and raced to the editor's corner office on her tiny, perfect heels, quivering all over, as if Barb had threatened her with violence. Even her topknot-dyed into submission and touched up every two weeks so nary a root showed in the fierce chestnut red-shook as if in fear.

Barb might have been worried, if she hadn't witnessed the same performance at least twice a month since she'd started working in the newsroom last summer. Mrs. Hennessey raged up and down in the editor's office, shaking her tiny fists, demanding Barb's ouster. She huffed out of the room and, within seconds, Barb was summoned by electronic message.

"If you could just see your way to being a bit more tactful with her..." the editor, Mike Bagley, began.

"I'll try," Barb said. "I do try. Do you ask her to be more tactful with me? She treats me like her personal servant. Granted, the computer eats her work every now and then, but most of her problems stem from the fact that she refuses to do the most basic stuff correctly. I'm not her keeper."

"She's an"-he looked around as if fearful of being overheard-"an older woman. Set in her ways. We're not going to change her at this point."

"So that little tail wags the whole newsroom's dog?"

Bagley, a large man with thin gingery hair that had faded with age to the color of Tang, made a face. "That conjures up quite an image. Mrs. Hennessey's tail. My eyes! But look, Barb. Your career path has been unorthodox at best. Your people skills are less than..."

She waited, curious to hear what word he would put to it. Nonexistent? Crippled? But he didn't even try to finish the sentence.

"We are utterly dependent on you. When the system crashes and you bring it back up, your work saves us thousands of dollars. You know that and I know that. So let Mrs. Hennessey pretend that she's a person of consequence, as opposed to an age-discrimination suit waiting to happen. Just apologize to her."

"Apologize? It wasn't my fault."

"You called her a c.r.a.ppy writer."

"I...?" She laughed. "I said that it was a poor craftsman who blames his tools. It's just an old saying. I didn't say s.h.i.+t about her writing. But she is, isn't she?" Barb mulled on this. It had not occurred to her before that she was ent.i.tled to have an opinion about the words that appeared on the screens she tended. She had been plucked out of the Cla.s.sified department, a computer savant discovered in the newspaper's equivalent of Schwab's. She wasn't even conscious of reading the paper, but she had been, she realized, and Mrs. Hennessey was a c.r.a.ppy writer.

"Just say you're sorry, Barb. Sometimes the expedient way is the right way."

She looked at him through her lashes, eyes glowering. Do you know what I could do to this system? Do you realize I could cripple this whole operation? In her six-month evaluation, Bagley-who had no right to supervise her, given that he had no inkling what her job involved-had written that she needed to "work on her anger." Oh, she worked on it, all right. She banked it like a fire every night, recognizing it as her best source of energy.

"And who will apologize to me?"

He had no idea what she was talking about. "Look, I agree that Mrs. Hennessey is a handful. But she didn't say boo to you. And she thinks that you said she's a bad writer. It's just easier all around if you apologize."

"Easier for who?"

"For whom," he corrected. What an a.s.shole. "Okay, it's easier for me. And I'm the boss, right? So just say you're sorry and let me get the h.e.l.l out of this hen fight."

SHE FOUND MRS. HENNESSEY in the break room, a grimy alcove of vending machines and Formica-topped tables.

"I'm sorry," she said stiffly The older woman inclined her head with equal stiffness, a queen staring down her nose at a peasant. That is, she would have been staring down at Barb if she hadn't been seated. "Thank you."

"It was just a saying." Barb didn't know why she felt compelled to keep speaking. She had done what she'd been told to do. "I wasn't implying anything about your writing."

"I've been a reporter for thirty-five years," Mrs. Hennessey said. She had a first name, Mary Rose. It appeared in her byline, but it was never used in conversation. She was always Mrs. Hennessey. "I've worked at this paper longer than you've been alive. Women like me, we made your career possible. I covered desegregation."

"Yeah? That was a big issue-" She stopped herself, just in time. She had been on the verge of saying "That was a big issue where I grew up." But she was Barbara Monroe, of Chicago, Illinois. She had attended a big-city high school, Mather. A big school in a big city was easier to fake than a small one, because anyone could be forgotten in a big school. But she wasn't sure if desegregation had been a big issue in Chicago. Probably, but why risk saying anything too specific? "That was a big issue in the seventies, wasn't it?"

"Yes, it was. And I covered it single-handedly."

"Great."

She had meant to sound sincerely impressed, but her voice betrayed her as it sometimes did, and the word came out a little sour, sarcastic.

"It was great. It was meaningful. More meaningful than tinkering with machines for a living. I'm writing the first draft of history. What are you but a mechanic?"

The would-be insult made Barb laugh. It was just so funny that this was Mrs. Hennessey's idea of a cutting remark. But her laughter provoked the old woman even more.

"Oh, you think you're so special, wiggling around the newsroom in your tight s.h.i.+rts and short skirts so the men all look at you. You think you matter."

The editor had told her that she did matter, that she was essential. "I don't see what my wardrobe has to do with this, Mrs. Hennessey. And I honestly think that your work was great-"

"Was? Was? Is. My work is great, you, you...guttersnipe!"

Again she wanted to laugh at the older woman's idea of an insult. Yet this one was more effective somehow, finding a soft spot. s.e.x, her own s.e.xuality, was a touchy subject for her. She didn't flirt with the men in the newsroom, or anywhere else for that matter, and her skirts weren't short. If anything, they were long by the standard of the day, because her frame was pet.i.te, so skirts hung lower than they were supposed to, drooping on her hips. With her towering upsweep and high heels, Mrs. Hennessey was almost as tall as she.

Which could explain, perhaps, why she felt it was fair play to pick up the older woman's Diet Pepsi and pour it over her beautiful, quivering topknot.

THEY FIRED HER. Of course. Actually, they gave her the option of attending counseling sessions or leaving with two weeks' severance. "No references," Bagley added. As if she would ask for one, as if it would have any application when Barbara Monroe disappeared and another woman took her place. She took the severance.

She sneaked back in that night, using the newspaper's research tools, crude as they were. The newspaper's sole librarian was in her debt and had never dreamed why Barb wanted to know so much about the library, its capabilities. He'd been flattered, in fact, to show Barb all the things a well-trained librarian could do with a telephone and a list of reference desks in city libraries. t.i.tle searches, which kicked up property and court records, were also valuable, but they required time and money, neither of which she had right now, although she had sneaked a few through the newspaper's account over the past year. Dave Bethany was still on Algonquin Lane. Miriam Bethany remained missing, as she had been for some months now. Stan Dunham was at the same address-but then, she had never really lost contact with Stan Dunham.

Finally she picked out her new name and existence, just as Stan had taught her to do. Time to start over. Again. It was a burn, not being able to use this job on her resume, but she had decided that she wasn't going to stay in newspapers. Once she got the formal training she needed, she would find a more lucrative home for her skills, in an industry used to paying for talent. She could do better than the Fairfax Gazette, even if they did have to push her out of the nest. Didn't it always work that way? Even in the worst situation, she had always needed someone else to force her out, encourage her to move on. How she had cried that day at the Greyhound station, while other people smiled and nodded, thinking she was nothing more than a scared teenager who couldn't bear to leave home.

Her research done, the last thing she did was write a little code, her going-away gift to the Gazette. The next day, when Mrs. Hennessey logged on, the whole thing crashed, taking with it every article in progress, even those that more responsible reporters had diligently backed up. By then she was already in a diner in Anacostia, waiting for Stan Dunham. He had tried to persuade her to drive farther north, but she told him that she wouldn't cross the district line into Maryland. And to this day, whatever she wanted from Stan Dunham, she got.

CHAPTER 36.

"Because she was adopted, you know?"

Dave had been waiting in line for a cinnamon twist when this one sentence managed to break free of the general hum around him, flinging itself at him like a shoe or a small stone. The comment, however, was not addressed to him but was part of a conversation between two placid middle-aged women waiting behind him in line.

"What?" he asked, as if it had been their intent to involve him in their conversation. "Who was adopted?"

"Lisa Steinberg," said one.

"The little girl in New York who was beaten by her adoptive father? It's great that the b.a.s.t.a.r.d is going to jail. But they shoulda gotten the woman, too. No real mother would have sat idly by while that was going on. No way, no how."

They nodded, smug and content, the entire world known to them. They were doughy, pasty-faced women, anti-advertis.e.m.e.nts for the baked goods sold at Bauhof 's. Dave was reminded of a book that Heather and Sunny had loved, Beastly Boys and Ghastly Girls, with whimsical drawings by someone of note. Addams? Gorey? Something like that, very clever line drawings. One story was about a boy who ate nothing but sweets until he melted in the sun, just a puddle of gelatinous flesh with facial features.

"How can-" he began, but Miss Wanda, attuned to his moods after all these years as neighbors, diverted his attention the way a mother might have headed off a son's tantrum.

"Apple turnovers, today, Mr. Bethany. Still hot."

"I shouldn't..." he began. Dave was still at his college weight, but his own flesh was pretty doughy, too. Loose, with a slack to it that he couldn't seem to overcome. He had stopped running a few years earlier, no longer having time for it.

"C'mon, it's got apple in it. It's good for you. An apple a day, like the doctor said." And with the help of a turnover, Miss Wanda had him out of the store before he could lose his temper. A hot turnover, like a soft answer, turneth away wrath.

He had been out of sorts all morning, for the usual reasons and some news ones. His annual caller hadn't checked in. It had been years since the guy had actually said anything, now preferring the pa.s.sive hara.s.sment of a hang-up call, but the call had continued to come every March 29. Strange to mind that of all things, but it gnawed at Dave. Was the guy dead? Or had he given up, too? Even the creeps were moving on with their lives. Then Dave had called Willoughby. The detective hadn't forgotten the date, far from it. He had offered the stoic understanding that Dave had come to expect, a wordless commiseration. No "Hey, Dave, what's up?" No pretense of progress. Just "h.e.l.lo, Dave. I'm looking at the file right now." Willoughby looked at the file all the time, but he made a point of having it in front of him on this date.

Then Willoughby had dropped the bombsh.e.l.l on him.

"I'm retiring, Dave. End of this June."

"Retiring? You're so young. Younger than me."

"We can go at twenty with full pension, and I've racked up twenty-two. My wife-Evelyn's health has never been great. I'd like to spend some time with her before-They have these places, where you can live on your own, but then when you get sick, you stay on the premises, in your own apartment. We're not there yet, but in five years or so...I'd like to have-what do they call it?-quality time with her."

"Will you work at all? Freud believed work was essential to a man's well-being. A person's."

"Maybe volunteer somewhere. I don't need-Well, I have plenty of things to keep me busy."

Probably he had been on the verge of saying: I don't need the money. But even now, after knowing Dave for fourteen years, after speaking of things at once intimate and terrible, Willoughby had his pockets of reticence. Perhaps he was so used to being guarded about his trust-fund status around his colleagues that he couldn't break the habit with Dave. Once, only once, he had asked Dave to a Christmas party, a pity invite. Dave had expected a raucous cop blowout. Yearned for it, in fact, for such a party would be a novelty to him. But it was more of a family and neighborhood affair-and what a family, what a neighborhood. This was the kind of gentle, a.s.sured social ease that the Pikesville families of Dave's youth had been trying to achieve with all their noisy show and clamor, but it was impossible to imitate wealth at this level. Plaid pants, cheese puffs, gin martinis, thin-shanked women and red-faced men, all speaking quietly, no matter how much hard liquor they put away. It was the kind of event that he would have liked to describe to Miriam, if they still spoke. Miriam's phone had been disconnected. He knew this because he had tried to call her last night.

"What will...who will..." His voice had gotten thick and he felt almost overwhelmed with panic.

"The case has already been a.s.signed," Willoughby said quickly. "A smart young detective. And I'll make a point of impressing upon him that you're to be kept in the loop. Nothing will change."

That's the problem, Dave thought bleakly. Nothing will change. Leads will pop up, only to evaporate like dew. Every now and then, a crazy person or a prisoner angling for special treatment will claim to have a tip, then be discredited. Nothing will change. The only difference will be that the new detective, whatever he knows, whatever's in the case file, won't have been with me every step of the way. It was, in some ways, more wrenching than the break with Miriam, and certainly more unexpected.

"Will we still...talk?"

"Of course. Anytime. h.e.l.l, I'll be keeping tabs, don't think that I won't."

"Okay," he said.

"I have to be politic, of course. Can't breathe down the new guy's neck too much. But this case will always belong to me. It's one of the two closest to my heart."

"One of two?" Dave couldn't help himself. He was shocked to hear that any other case had a claim on Willoughby's attention.

"The other one was solved," Willoughby said quickly. "Long ago. That one was about...good police work, in the face of difficult odds. It doesn't compare."

"Yes, I can see how a case that centered on good police work wouldn't compare to mine."

"Dave."

"I'm sorry. It's just today. That today is today, that day. Fourteen years, and not even a b.u.m lead, a wisp of a rumor, in the last two. I still don't know how to do this, Chet."

"This" being everything-not just his status as a perpetual victim of a crime that had never been delineated but his very existence. He had learned how to go on, because that phrase denoted a long, trudging trip to nowhere, pure inertia. Going on was easy. But he had long ago forgotten how to be. For the first time in years, he thought of his friends in the Fivefold Path, the ritual burning and meditation that he had abandoned because he could no longer pretend that he lived in any moment. In Alice's Wonderland, the rule was jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today. In Dave's world, there was no today, only yesterday and tomorrow.

"No one's equipped for what you've been through, Dave. Not even a police. I probably shouldn't tell you this, but-the file's been in my house more often than not. Now, in light of my retirement...it has to go back, but it will always be in my head. You have my promise. I'll be here for you. Not just today, not just this day. Every day for the rest of my life. Even when I retire-retire, it will be around here. I won't go to Florida or Arizona. I'll be here."

The detective's words had placated him, at least superficially. But Dave had been spoiling for a fight all the morning, and the mood didn't dissipate. The Steinberg case had made him crazy since it hit the headlines eighteen months earlier, and last week's sentencing had dredged up all those feelings again. Any story of child abuse or neglect by parents made Dave insane. Lisa Steinberg had been killed two weeks after the little girl in Texas, Jessica, had fallen into the well, and Dave had been angry about that, too. Where were the parents? His experience, strange to say, had made him less empathetic. He picked apart others as they had picked him apart. Adam Walsh, Etan Patz, the whole sad strange fraternity of bereavement-he wanted nothing to do with it.

WIND CHIMES SANG as he entered the store, now known simply as TBG-or, as the low-key, lowercase sign had it, tbg. When he made the switch, he thought about trying to use the entire name-tmwtbg-but even he could see that it was a mouthful. The clothing section of the store now took up as much s.p.a.ce as the folk art. It had become the very type of store that Miriam had nagged him into trying, much more accessible. It was a raging success. He hated it.

"Hey, boss," said Pepper, his current manager, a breezy young woman with thirteen hoops in her left earlobe and dark hair that had been razor-cut in the back yet kept long in the front, so long it fell into her eyes. She was Windexing the display cases. Pepper could not have been more proprietary about the store if it were her own, and Dave had yet to figure out what had made her so responsible at such a young age. She had a talent for deflection, a way of avoiding revelation. Dave had the same tendency, but he knew what had formed his temperament. Pepper might have known pain and heartache, but he could not imagine that this sunny, wholesome young woman-despite the hair, those thirteen hoops, she was a fresh-faced, all-American type-had anything truly tragic in her past. He'd thought about asking Willoughby to do a more thorough background check on her, claiming the pretext that he thought she might have sought employment with him because she knew someone or something connected to his girls' disappearance. But he had never misused his daughters that way, and he didn't want to start.

Pepper was beautiful, too, the kind of young woman noticed by the reluctant boyfriends and husbands dragged into the store. But Dave saw this only in the abstract. Whenever he met a woman, he estimated her age relative to what his daughters would be, and if she weren't at least fifteen years older, he wanted nothing to do with her. Sunny would have turned twenty-nine this year, he thought with a pang. Therefore, he wouldn't consider a woman of less than forty-five. Which should have been good news for the middle-aged women of Baltimore-a successful, available man who would never want a younger woman-except that Dave's relations.h.i.+ps never worked. It had become common to speak of one's past as baggage, but Dave's past was so much larger, so much more burdensome, that it could never be understood as a single object that he dragged behind him. His past was like riding a monster with a las.h.i.+ng tail. He clung to it reluctantly, knowing that he would be crushed by its heedless feet if he ever relinquished his grip.

It was a quiet morning, so he went over the books with Pepper, taking her deeper into the workings of tbg than any previous employee had been allowed. He reminded her of the spring craft show, asked if she would like to be his representative there. She squealed, actually squealed, and bit a knuckle in delight.