What The Dead Know Part 8

CHAPTER 15.

One more night. One more night. Everyone had said she couldn't stay in the hospital beyond today, but she'd gotten one more night out of them, which just proved what she had always believed: Everybody lied, all the time. One more night. There had been a hideous pop song with that t.i.tle, years ago, a spurned lover begging for a final bout of lovemaking. It was a frequent motif in pop music, come to think of it. Touch me in the morning. I can't make you love me if you don't. She had never understood this. When she was younger, still trying to date-and, big surprise, failing miserably time and time again-the men usually ended up leaving her a few months in, almost as if they could smell the rottenness coming off her, as if they had found her secret sell-by date and realized how ruined she was. At any rate, when a man broke off with her, the last thing she wanted from him was one more night. Sometimes she threw things, and sometimes she cried. Sometimes she laughed, relieved. But she never resorted to begging for one more night, a touch in the morning, a pity f.u.c.k however you sliced or diced it. You took your pride where you could find it.

She eased herself out of the bed, everything aching, her body already sensing that the left arm was not to be counted on, not for a while, that the right arm had to pick up the slack. Amazing how quickly the body adjusted, much faster than the mind. Her mind was far from reliable these days. Did I see a boy and think he was a girl, or was there never a face at the window at all? She went to the window, pulled aside the curtain, and studied the landscape-the parking lot, the smudge of city skyline in the distance, the clogged lanes of I-95 at rush hour. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! A line of poetry stuck in her head, a legacy of the nuns, who believed you could memorize your way to intelligence. The highway was near, not even a mile away. Could she get there, put out her thumb and hitch a ride home? No, she'd be a fugitive twice over then. She had to tough this out. But how?

It wasn't the lies that worried her. She could keep track of the lies. It was the bits of truths that put her at risk. A good liar survives by using as little truth as possible, because the truth trips you up far more often. Back when she'd been in the habit of changing names, she had learned to create each new ident.i.ty fresh, to carry nothing forward. But the threat of jail this afternoon, just like the possibility of arrest that first night, had freaked her out. She had to say something. It had seemed pretty inspired, telling them about the cop, throwing Karl Malden into the mix. Odd, tangential details like that made everything else sound authentic. But they weren't going to settle for Karl Malden. They were clamoring for a real name, and she was going to have to give them something, someone.

"I'm sorry," she whispered to the night sky.

She wasn't sure who worried her more, the dead or the living, who posed the most risk. But at least you could bluff the living. You couldn't put anything over on the dead.

PART IV.

PRAj.a.pATAYE SVAHA. PRAj.a.pATAYE IDAM NA MAMA. (1976).

Agnihotra mantras are to be uttered in their original form in Sanskrit.

They are not to be translated into any other language....

Agnihotra mantras are to be uttered in rhythmically balanced tone so the sound vibrates throughout the entire household. The tone should not be too loud or too weak nor should it be done in a hurry.... The feeling of total surrender is developed through the utterance of these mantras.

-Adapted from instructions on how to perform the Agnihotra, the sunrise/sunset ritual central to the practice of the Fivefold Path

CHAPTER 16.

Sunset fast approaching, Dave grabbed the ghee from the refrigerator and headed into the study, leaving Chet at the kitchen table with Miriam and their mugs of tea. They weren't even trying to speak, just sipping herbal tea and staring off into s.p.a.ce. Everyone was exhausted and hoa.r.s.e after the full day of interviews, although Dave had done most of the talking. Miriam deferred to Dave, and the detective seldom spoke at all. Sometimes Dave found Willoughby's silence comforting. Men of action should be laconic. Other times he suspected that these still waters didn't run particularly deep. But Chet was familiar to them now, like a dignified stray they had adopted after years of saying they didn't want the bother of a dog.

In his study he sat cross-legged on his rug, not a proper prayer rug-other than the copper pot for the offering, the Agnihotra did not require ritual objects, which was a large part of its charm-but a dhurrie he'd found in an Indian market years ago, when he was traveling after college. His mother had still lived in Baltimore then, and he'd s.h.i.+pped his treasures to her apartment, despite her complaints and suspicions. "What's in these boxes?" she had berated him upon his homecoming. "Drugs? If the police come to my door, I am not lying for you."

He put a dung cake in the pot, adding a piece of ghee-soaked camphor, followed by the rest of the dung and the rice grains, checking his watch to see if the exact moment of sunset had arrived.

"Agnaye Svaha," he said, offering the first part of the ghee-smeared rice grains. "Agnaye Idam Na Mama."

People often a.s.sumed that the Fivefold Path was another souvenir from his travels, but Dave was married to Miriam and working for the state when he first heard about it, at a party in Northwest Baltimore. The Fivefold Path turned out to be the nexus for most of the people at the party, held at a beautiful Victorian in Old Sudbrook. Dave had not known such houses existed when he was growing up in Pikesville, much less such people, yet Herb and Estelle Turner lived less than two miles from his mother's former apartment. The Turners were at once warm and reserved, and Dave a.s.sumed that their grave dignity derived from the Fivefold Path. It would be some time before he knew about their troubles with their daughter, or Estelle's fragile health. And although Miriam had always been skeptical of the couple, claiming they'd been fis.h.i.+ng for converts that night, they only brought up the Fivefold Path when Dave asked about the house's sweet, smoky smell, so unexpected on a warm spring night. He had suspected, hoped for, gra.s.s, which he and Miriam were anxious to try. But the fragrance was from the sunrise/sunset ritual of the Agnihotra, and it was almost as if it had baked its way into the bones of the house. As Estelle Turner explained the smell, and its connection to the Fivefold Path, Dave saw it as a way to be the Turners-gracious, poised, living in a beautiful yet unostentatious house.

For her part, Miriam said the Agnihotra made the house smell like s.h.i.+t, literally. Once they moved to Algonquin Lane, she had been adamant that Dave confine the practice to his study, with the doors closed. Even then she had despaired at the greasy residue the ghee left on the walls, a filmy sheen that resisted any and all cleaning methods. Now, Dave suspected, he could set up the 'Hotra on the dining room table and Miriam wouldn't make a peep. She never reproached him anymore. He almost missed it. Almost.

Still your mind, he urged himself. Focus on your mantra. There was no point to the practice if he couldn't lose himself in it.

"Praj.a.pataye Svaha," he said, making the second offering. "Praj.a.pataye Idam Na Mama."

Now he must meditate until the fire was out.

THE REPORTERS HAD come in threes-three newspapers, three television stations, three radio stations, three wire services. In each group there had been one reporter who pushed for an exclusive, a private chat with Dave and Miriam, but those young comers professed to understand when Chet told them that the Bethanys preferred to tell the story only so many times, once to each medium. The reporters were uniformly polite and kind, wiping their feet on the welcome mat, expressing admiration for the remodeled farmhouse, not that any work had been done in the past year. Their voices were gentle, their questions circ.u.mspect. One young woman, from Channel 13, teared up prettily while looking at the girls' photos. These were not the school photos, the head shots against the sky-blue background. The television types explained to Dave and Miriam that these photos had been shown so many times that they had "lost their impact," and it would be helpful to use new ones. They chose candid snapshots that Dave kept in his study, souvenirs of a trip to the Enchanted Forest on Route 40. Heather was sitting on a toadstool, cross-legged, while Sunny stood with arms akimbo, trying to pretend she wasn't having a good time. But it had been a wonderful day, as Dave remembered it, with Sunny's adolescent moodiness barely in evidence, everyone tender and sweet with each other.

The newspaper reporters, the last to troop through that day, had no qualms about using the school photos that had been circulating since the girls disappeared. Yet they insisted on a new photo of Dave and Miriam, sitting with the framed school photos on the coffee table in front of them. How Dave dreaded seeing that tableau in tomorrow's newspaper-the awkward lie of his arm across Miriam's shoulders, the distance between their bodies, their faces turned away from each other.

"I know that there was one ransom demand, in the first week," said the reporter for the Beacon, the morning newspaper. "And it turned out to be a hoax. Have there been any similar dead ends over the past year?"

"I don't know-" Dave looked to Miriam, but she would not speak unless pressed directly.

"I wouldn't expect you to tell me anything that could hurt the investigation."

"There were other calls. Not ransom demands. More like...taunts. Obscene phone calls, although not in the traditional sense." He stroked his chin, where he was growing a beard, or trying to, and glanced at Chet, who was frowning. "You know, maybe you shouldn't put that in? The police determined it was just some sick kid. He didn't know us, or the girls. It didn't mean anything."

"Of course," the Beacon reporter said, nodding in robust sympathy. Forty or so, he had been a war correspondent in Vietnam and spent time in the Beacon's foreign bureaus-London, Tokyo, So Paulo. He had arrived first and managed to convey this information about himself in the flurry of introductions at the beginning. His credentials were supposed to be a comfort, Dave supposed, an a.s.surance that the a.s.signment had been given to an accomplished professional. But Dave couldn't help feeling that the man was trying to console himself, too. Two missing girls were not on a par with wars and foreign policy. He looked liked a drinker, his nose sprouting with broken blood vessels, his cheeks an unhealthy red.

"The one ransom demand-the one down at War Memorial Plaza-did they ever figure out who called that in?" This was the Light reporter, tiny and feisty. With her short pixie cut and miniskirt, she looked to be barely out of college. A jogger, Dave thought, eyeing the hard calves pressed into the lower rung of her straight-backed chair. He had started running after the first of the year, although it wasn't the result of a New Year's resolution. Like someone summoned by unseen voices, he had gotten up one day, put on sneakers and headed to Leakin Park, circling the tennis courts and the miniature train track. He had run to Crimea, the summer mansion built by the family that founded the B & O Railroad, pa.s.sing the old church that his girls had believed was haunted. He was up to five miles a day now, but he had liked jogging better in the beginning, when it was hard and he had to focus on every rasping breath. Now that he reached the so-called runner's high within minutes, his mind was free to roam again, and it always ended up in the same place.

"No...I...no-Look, there's nothing new. I'm sorry. It's been a year, and there's nothing new. I'm sorry. We're talking to you because we're hopeful that your articles might prompt someone's memory, might reach that one person who knows something.... I'm sorry."

Miriam shot him a look that only a spouse could interpret: Stop apologizing. His eyes replied, I'll stop when you start.

The reporters didn't seem to notice. Did they know? Had Chet told them-off the record, of course-all the family's secrets, then persuaded them that they were irrelevant to the girls' disappearance? Dave almost wished now that the whole story had come out. On his best days, he knew it wasn't Miriam's fault. Wherever Miriam had been that day-at an open house, here on Algonquin Lane, in a motel, in a motel, in a f.u.c.king motel-she couldn't have saved the girls. Besides, he'd been in a bar for much of the afternoon, although he had managed to pull himself together and arrive at the mall to fetch the girls, no more than five minutes late. His chest still hurt, thinking about how he had felt that afternoon. Anger, a.s.suming that the girls were late, inconsiderate. Panic, but a safe, this-will-soon-pa.s.s-and-I-can-be-angry-again panic. When forty-five minutes had pa.s.sed, he checked with the mall security, and he still remembered with great affection the overweight security guard who had walked the corridors with him, his voice a rumbling ba.s.s of benign possibilities. "Maybe they took the bus home. Maybe they decided to take one of those shopper surveys, back in the offices. Maybe they got a ride home with a friend's mother or father and thought they could get home in time to call you at your work."

Dave had seized on the security guard's words as if they were a promise, racing home in his VW bus, certain that the girls would be there, finding only Miriam. It had been so strange, seeing her, wanting to confront her, yet having to put aside the suddenly minor fact of her infidelity. Miriam had been marvelously calm, calling the police, agreeing that Dave should go back to the mall and continue searching while she stayed at the house in case they showed up. At 7:00 P.M., they still a.s.sumed the girls would show up. It was hard to describe how slowly that expectation, that hope-what had once seemed their right-had slipped away. Yet emotion was not linear, and the absence of a definitive answer still made Dave's imagination jump and lurch, concocting far-fetched endings. This was the stuff of soap operas, so why shouldn't it have a soap-opera ending? Simultaneous amnesia, an eccentric Greek billionaire whisking Dave's children away, unharmed, to live in a Bavarian castle. Why not?

Whatever Miriam's sins, Dave had been the one to give permission for the mall trip, and although Miriam had a.s.sured him again and again that he had not erred, he still blamed...her. He'd been distracted, anxious. At the time he'd thought he was worried about the business, but he saw in hindsight that he'd known that something was wrong in their marriage, that his subconscious was picking up signals it didn't know how to translate. If he'd been more present that day, if he'd been focused on his daughters, he might have realized they were too young to be given that much freedom. Miriam had set him up.

He felt no guilt over Jeff Baumgarten or his wife, who had been subjected to repeated police interviews after Miriam volunteered the truth. After all, Thelma Baumgarten had been in Dave's store at 3:00 P.M., and the store wasn't more than three miles from the mall. The motel was even closer, as it turned out. But Dave hated Mrs. Baumgarten more than he hated Jeff. Jeff had f.u.c.ked his wife, but Mrs. Baumgarten...Well, Mrs. Baumgarten, with her stupid little note, had tried to project all this on Dave. Fat little hausfrau. If she'd kept her husband happy, maybe he would have left Miriam alone.

"Were there any strong suspects along the way?" Dave looked at Chet, longing for permission, for encouragement, to tell everything about the Baumgartens. Chet shook his head, ever so slightly. It would only muddy the waters, he'd told Dave whenever he lobbied to make everything-everything-public on the grounds that every bit of truth mattered, that it was not only a virtue in and of itself, but essential to learning what had happened to his daughters. The more the public knew, the better equipped people were to help them. Maybe Mrs. Baumgarten had hired someone. Maybe Jeff Baumgarten had arranged for the children to be kidnapped to force Miriam to continue their illicit affair. Maybe something had gone wrong with his plan. Candor was liberating, Dave argued, and it would be rewarded. They should put everything out there and let the chips fall where they may.

Maybe that was why Chet had decided he should be here for the interviews. Dave couldn't see any other reason. Very little had been held back in the early weeks of the investigation-the discovery of Heather's purse, the calls that placed the girls in various states (South Carolina, West Virginia, Virginia, Vermont) and various states (alive and laughing, swimming and playing, eating hamburgers, bound and gagged). Funny, but those delusional types were worse than the pranksters in their own way. They thought their fantasies were helpful, but all they brought was pain.

"Do you-can you-" The Star reporter, an absolute throwback, with a hat on the back of his head and a narrow tie, groped for words in a way that Dave knew could end up in only one place. "Do you continue to hope that your daughters will be found alive?"

"Of course. Hope is essential." Mutual amnesia, a castle in Bavaria, a gentle eccentric who wanted two golden-haired daughters, but would never, ever harm them.

"No," Miriam said.

In the corner of the room, Chet tensed, as if he thought he might have to intercede. Had the detective finally detected something? Could he know that it was Dave's instinct, at that very moment, to slap his wife? It wouldn't be the first time that he had fought down that impulse in the past year. The reporters seemed shocked, too, as if Miriam had broken some unwritten protocol of the mourning parent.

"You'll have to excuse my wife," Dave said. "She's very emotional, and this is such a difficult time-"

"I'm not a child who didn't get my nap today," Miriam said. "And I'm no more emotional today than I was yesterday or I'll be tomorrow. I would love to be wrong about this. But if I don't accept the probability of their deaths at this point, how do I live? How do I go on?"

The reporters did not take notes during this outburst, Dave noticed. Their instinct, like everyone else's, always, was to protect Miriam, to a.s.sume that her inappropriate comments had come out of grief. Reporters were supposed to be cynical, and maybe they were, when they were covering stories of Watergate-like intrigue and conspiracy. But in Dave's experience they were among the most naive and optimistic people he had ever met.

"I'm sorry," he said, and even he didn't know why he was apologizing this time.

After a beat, Miriam nodded as well, rounding her shoulders in a way that invited Dave to put his arm around her. "It's hard," she said. "Remaining open to hope, yet needing to grieve. Whatever I do or say, I feel as if I'm betraying my daughters. We just want to know."

"Is there a moment in the day when you're not thinking about this?" asked the Light reporter.

The question caught Dave off guard, in part because it was new. How do you go on, how do you not think about this? Those he knew. But was he ever not thinking about the girls? Rationally, there must be such moments, but he couldn't identify them now that he was trying. When he made preparations for dinner, he still reviewed the girls' likes and dislikes. Meat loaf again? Stopped at a red light in afternoon traffic, he would relive the conversations they once had about the nearby Social Security Administration and why it had so many employees who clogged the streets every day at 4:00 P.M. They'll give us money when we're old? Cool! If he started thinking about how much he hated Jeff Baumgarten, how he wanted to wait outside his Pikesville home and run over him with the VW bus when he came out to pick up the morning newspaper from the circular driveway-even that was really about the girls, wasn't it? When he opened the mailbox and found his copy of New York magazine, he would see the Ronrico rum ad on the back and be reminded of how fascinated Heather was by its campy re-creations, while Sunny had giggled over the weekly word contests. Every object in the world-the collapsed lean-to that the girls had built in the backyard, the glittering green of a Genesee ale can in the gutter, Miriam's ratty blue bathrobe-brought him back to his daughters. Conventional wisdom held that he could not continue at this level of intensity forever, that all pain fades, but he wanted to keep it going. The dull fury he felt was like a lamp lighted in the window, waiting for the girls to find their way home.

Even now his mind would not stop racing, which defeated the purpose of the Agnihotra. He had tried, delicately, to bring this up with the others who followed the Fivefold Path. Estelle Turner was long dead, of course, and Herb had wandered out to Northern California after she was gone, saying he had to cut all ties in order to go on. Dave had called him about the girls, but Herb had seemed vaguely resentful to be reminded of his prior life in Baltimore and had turned the conversation inside out so it ended up being about him, his various disillusionments and losses. "I just can't find the way, buddy," he said repeatedly. But then everything had been an abstraction to Herb-except for Estelle. Even the death of Herb's own daughter had been shrugged off as some kind of spiritual test, part of his G.o.dd.a.m.n journey.

There were still others in Baltimore who followed the Fivefold Path and they had been exceptionally kind to Dave over the last twelve months, providing what Miriam dryly called a never-ending supply of soybean ca.s.seroles. Yet even these friends seemed upset when he tried to suggest that their mutual belief system might not be large enough to get him through this. What did it mean if he could not clear his mind for the daily meditation? Should he abandon it until he could find the necessary concentration, or should he continue to try, every sunrise and sunset, to empty his head and embrace the now? Here he was, coming to the end of the sunset ritual, and he remembered none of it, had failed to find any peace or contentment. Instead he was beginning to see the Agnihotra as Miriam had always seen it-a s.h.i.+tty smell, a greasy smoke that coated the walls of the study.

The fire was out. He bagged the ashes, which he used as fertilizer, and drifted back to the kitchen, pouring a gla.s.s of wine for himself and a shot of whiskey for Chet. As an afterthought, he gave Miriam a gla.s.s of wine, too.

"Really, Chet-has there been any progress? Can you look back at the past year and say we've learned anything?" He thought it was generous, using "we." Privately, Dave thought the cops, while kind and earnest, had been nothing short of inept.

"We've eliminated a lot of scenarios. The Rock Glen chorus teacher. Um...others." Even in private, Chet wouldn't rub Miriam's nose in the Baumgarten mess. It killed Dave how the cops had all but congratulated Miriam for being so forthcoming about the affair, how they had nodded approvingly that Sunday evening as she volunteered everything. Truthful Miriam, candid Miriam, putting aside the usual instinct of self-protection and preservation to do whatever it took to find her daughters. But if Miriam hadn't had a talent for deceit to begin with-if she hadn't been involved in the stupid affair-then she wouldn't have had anything to hide. Dave sure didn't.

Yet it was Dave who had lied at first, skipping over the part about Mrs. Baumgarten's visit, stammering inexpertly about why he'd chosen to close the shop early and go drink beer at the tavern down the block. He'd been nervous and halting in those early interviews with police, his eyes darting around the room. Had that been the problem? Had the police been so focused on Dave's odd behavior that they a.s.sumed he was the culprit? They denied it now, but Dave was sure he was a suspect.

"Did you chant?" Chet knew Dave's routines well by now.

"Yeah," Dave said. "Another day, another sunset. And in three hundred sixty-five more sunsets, will we be here again, telling the story again, hoping again that someone will come forward? Or do the anniversaries begin to s.p.a.ce out after the first year? Five years, ten years, then twenty, then fifty?"

"Three hundred sixty-six," Miriam said.

"What?"

"This was a leap year: 1976. So there was an extra day. It's been three hundred sixty-six years since the girls disappeared. I mean days, three hundred sixty-six days."

"Well, bully for you, Miriam, having it down to the day. I guess you loved them more than me, after all. Except today is the twenty-seventh, not the twenty-ninth. The reporters needed time to ready their stories and reports for the Monday papers, the actual anniversary. So it's really day three hundred sixty-four."

"Dave-" This was Chet's real role in their lives, more peacemaker than policeman. But Dave already felt contrite. A year ago-well, 364 days-he had thought losing his wife would be the great tragedy of his life. Hunched over the bar at Monaghan's, he had experienced the cuckold's usual emotions-anger, vengeance, self-pity, fear. He'd played with the idea of divorcing Miriam, confident that he was one father who could retain custody of his children, considering the circ.u.mstances. Instead he lost his children and kept his wife.

Given a choice-but he hadn't been given a choice. Who really was, when it came to anything that mattered? But if he had been asked to choose, he would have sacrificed Miriam in a heartbeat if it meant getting Sunny and Heather back, and it was understood that she would do the same to him. Their marriage was a brittle memorial to their lost daughters, truly the very least they could do.

He said good night to Chet and took his drink to the back porch, studying the tire swing that hung from the one truly st.u.r.dy tree in the yard, the pile of sticks and timber near the fence line. When the girls were little, they'd been fond of building forts in the backyard, lean-tos of limbs and branches, with "carpets" made from moss that they transplanted from other parts of the yard, and stores of onion gra.s.s and dandelions for their food supply. The girls had outgrown such things years ago, but their last fort had stood until this past winter, when it collapsed from the weight and moisture of the snow. Dave felt as if he lived in a house of broken sticks, as if he were, in fact, impaled on the sharp ends, the moss long dead, the supply of wild onions depleted.

CHAPTER 17.

Alone at last-alone again, naturally, as the song would have it, a song that Sunny had listened to over and over again when she was eleven, eventually driving them all crazy-Miriam walked over to the sink and poured her gla.s.s of wine down the drain. She didn't have much of a taste for alcohol anymore, not that Dave noticed such things. In order for Dave to observe how little Miriam drank these days, he would have to see how much more he drank, and that particular brand of self-knowledge didn't interest him.

The sink was directly beneath a large window that overlooked the backyard, the only change that Miriam had sought during the house's renovation. A woman has to have a window over the sink, she argued when she saw Dave's original plans, in which the sink was to face a backsplash of Mexican tile. This was her mother's dictate, and Miriam had inculcated this principle in her own daughters. She remembered Heather, arranging her Creative Playthings dollhouse. A modular affair, this open-air rectangle of blue wood was quite different from the furbelowed Victorian that Heather would have picked out for herself. It even had Danish modern furniture, made from st.u.r.dy hardwoods. "The sink has to go in front of the woman," the rubbery mama doll told the rubbery daddy doll when Heather set it up the first time, and Miriam hadn't corrected Heather's mangling of her edict. The dolls had been the only flimsy things in that set, crumbling and drying as rubber inevitably does, the paint on their faces melting away. But the house and the furniture were still in Heather's closet, waiting for...what? For whom?

Overall the girls' rooms remained as they had been, although Miriam had finally broken down and washed the linens, making the beds that had been left tumbled and tossed, in Heather's case, smooth and barely wrinkled in Sunny's case. Each girl had used her own sleeping style to argue against bed making. "I'm just going to mess it up again," Heather said. "You can barely tell I've been in it," Sunny said. They had reached a compromise: Beds would be made, Monday through Friday, then left alone on the weekend. For weeks Miriam had taken great comfort in looking at those unmade beds, proof that their daughters intended to sleep in them again, that the week would return, and her daughters with it.

In the immediate aftermath-But no, "aftermath" was the wrong word, for it suggested a tangible event, something definitive. Where was the "math" in their situation, what was the "after"? In the first forty-eight hours, when nothing was known and everything was possible, Miriam felt as if she had been plunged into a cold, rus.h.i.+ng stream, and her only instinct was to survive the shock of it all. She ate nothing, she seldom slept, and she stoked her body on caffeine because she needed to be ready, alert. The one thing she a.s.sumed, in the early going, was that an answer would be forthcoming. With the ringing of the telephone, a knock on the door, all would be revealed.

How grandiose that expectation turned out to be.

Detective Willoughby-he was not yet Chet to her, just the detective, the police officer-Detective Willoughby thought she was so brave and selfless to admit, before the weekend was over, exactly where she'd been that afternoon. "The natural instinct is to lie," he told her. "About the smallest things. You'd be amazed how naturally and automatically people lie to police."

"If it helps find my daughters, then who cares? And if it doesn't...who cares?"

This was the Sunday after the girls had disappeared. The first twenty-four hours, the first forty-eight hours-everyone seemed to have a rule of thumb about the crucial window of opportunity. And everyone seemed to be wrong. There were no rules, Miriam found out. They didn't have to wait, for example, to report the girls missing. The police had taken them seriously from the very first call, sending officers to the house and then to the mall, where they walked through the thinning Sat.u.r.day-evening crowds with Miriam and Dave. Other people had been helpful, too. The usher at the cinema remembered the girls-and remembered that they had bought tickets for Escape to Witch Mountain, then tried to sneak into Chinatown. Miriam had a strange surge of pride in Sunny, hearing that. Docile, goody-goody Sunny, sneaking into an R-rated movie-and such a good one at that. Miriam didn't know she had it in her. When she saw her again, she wouldn't be angry, not in the least. In fact, she would sit down with Sunny and the movie listings, ask her if there were other R movies she wanted to see. Coppola, Fellini, Herzog-she and Sunny would become art house aficionados together.

What other promises did she make that Sat.u.r.day evening? She would find her way back to some sort of spiritual life. Not Dave's Fivefold Path, but maybe Judaism or, in a pinch, the Unitarian Church. And she wouldn't hock Dave anymore about the path, wouldn't tease him about the fact that he had adopted a spiritual practice because he envied the material goods of the people who introduced him to it. Much as she was grateful to the Turners, she didn't share Dave's gaga admiration of them. Their generosity to the Bethanys had been rooted in selfishness, contradictory as that might sound.

Other promises. She would be a better mother, making good meals, relying less on Chinese takeout and Marino's pizza. The girls' laundry would be done with meticulous care. Perhaps it was time to redecorate Sunny's room, to mark the rite of pa.s.sage into high school next year? And wasn't Heather going to outgrow the elaborate Where the Wild Things Are border in her room, beautiful as it was? Miriam had made that by buying two copies of the book, breaking the binding, then sh.e.l.lacking the pages to the wall, so the entire story was told. They could go, the three of them, to the flea market at Westview Drive-In and the Purple Heart, find old furniture and paint it bright, mod colors. Good linens couldn't be faked, so she would have to shop the so-called white sales at the department stores, come next January- All of this was going through Miriam's head that evening when the sight of the blue denim bag, which looked like a stain in the dim light of the parking lot, brought her back from the future with an abrupt, sickening thump. She gave a little cry and fell to her knees in the parking lot, but the young officer had restrained her.

"Don't touch it, ma'am. We should-Please, ma'am. There's a way to do this."

Little girls lose things. Purses and keys and hair ribbons and schoolbooks and jackets and sweaters and hats and mittens. To lose things is the nature of childhood. Being separated from this purse would be reason enough for Heather-stubborn, materialistic Heather-to refuse to go home, tracing and retracing her steps again and again and again and again. "Have you ever stopped to think," Miriam had asked her just a few weeks before, "why when you find something you lost, it's always in the last place you look?" How Heather had rejoiced in that bit of verbal tomfoolery, once she got it. Literal-minded Sunny had simply said, "Of course it is."

On her knees in the parking lot, Miriam yearned to grab the purse as if it were her daughter, but the young officer continued to hold her back. There was a mark on it-a footprint, a tire track. How Heather would anguish over that. The purse had come with two other sheaths, but this denim one was Heather's favorite. They would replace it, no recriminations about her carelessness. And tomorrow they would have an Easter-egg hunt, although the girls had claimed they were too old this year. That is, Sunny had said she was too old, not to bother, and Heather had swiftly agreed. A special hunt, with chocolates but also amazing treasures. Miriam could get the candy eggs from High's, but where would she find treasures at this time of night? The mall was open for another twenty minutes or so. Or she could go to the Blue Guitar and help herself to Dave's wares, and who cared how red the ink ran? She would pick out jewelry and toys and ceramic vases, which could be used for the daffodils and crocuses just beginning to poke their heads into the world.

Life was never as sharp again as it was at that moment. With each day as the possibility of an answer receded a little more, Miriam's senses dulled. The girls would not be found unharmed. The girls would not be found alive. The girls would not be found...intact, the all-purpose euphemism that Miriam used to denote everything from s.e.xual a.s.sault to actual dismemberment. But it was a long time before it occurred to anyone that the girls might not be found.