Laura Lippman - What The Dead Know

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 casseroles. 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 shitty 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 glass of wine for himself and a shot of whiskey for Chet. As an afterthought, he gave Miriam a glass 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 assumed 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 space 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 circumstances. 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 sturdy 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 grass 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.

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 glass 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 sturdy 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, rushing 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 assumed, 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.