Laura Lippman - What The Dead Know

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 Saturday-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 Saturday 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 passage 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 shellacking 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 sexual assault to actual dismemberment. But it was a long time before it occurred to anyone that the girls might not be found.

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

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

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