Laura Lippman - What The Dead Know

She listened well, better than most. You had to really listen to pick up on the omissions in another person’s conversation, and she was right-there was no way he was going to call her Heather. He didn’t believe her, plain and simple, had her pegged as a liar from the first time he met her. “Look, it’s not about belief or trust or sympathy. I like to work from established facts. Things that can be verified, and you haven’t really given me any of those. Why were you so sure your mother was dead?”

“Around the time I turned eighteen-”

“What year was that?”

“ April third, 1981. Please, Detective. I know my own birthday. No small miracle, given how many different birthdays I’ve had in my life.”

“Heather Bethany’s birthday is on the Internet. It was in the news stories. Everyone knows that Heather Bethany was just days away from her twelfth birthday when she disappeared.”

She didn’t bother to answer things she didn’t want to answer, more evidence of her shrewdness. “Anyway, around the time I turned eighteen, I was on my own. Cut loose, put on a bus, given lovely parting gifts, and sayonara.”

“He freed you, just like that? Kept you for six years and then waved bye-bye, with no fear of where you would go or what you would tell people?”

“He told me every day that my parents didn’t want me, that no one was looking for me, that I had no family to return to, that my parents had broken up and moved away. Eventually I came to believe that.”

“Still, what happens when you’re eighteen? Why does he let you go?”

She shrugged. “He’d lost interest. I was less…malleable as time went on. Still under his thumb, but beginning to nip at that thumb, make my own demands. It was time for me to support myself. I got on a bus-”

“Where?”

“Not yet. I won’t tell you where I started. But I got off in Chicago. It was so cold for April. I never knew April could be so cold. And there was a ticker-tape parade downtown, for the shuttle astronauts who had just returned. I remember wandering out of the bus station, into the Loop, and finding myself in the aftermath of this huge celebration. But I had missed the good part. All that was left was the trash.”

“That’s a nice story, I guess. Is it true or is it just a metaphor?”

“You’re smart .” Admiring and insulting at the same time.

“Why wouldn’t I be? Because I’m a cop?”

“Because you’re handsome.” To his own irritation he blushed, although it was far from the first time a woman had praised his looks. “It cuts both ways, you know. Men think pretty girls are dumb, but women think the same thing about a certain kind of man. One of the worst things you can do, as a woman, is have a boyfriend prettier than yourself. You could never be my boyfriend, Detective Infante.”

Through all of this, Gloria Bustamante had been still as a stone gooney-eyed gargoyle, but now she cleared her throat noisily, filling the awkward silence. Maybe she was even more freaked out by this conversation than Infante was.

“Heather does have something she’s willing to give you,” Gloria said. “A factoid, something you can check out and it will go a long way to establishing the authenticity of all her claims.”

“Why can’t she just give a statement?” he asked. “Dates, times, places. The name of the man who kidnapped her and killed her sister. She lived with him for six years. Presumably she knows his goddamn name.”

The woman in the hospital bed-he was running out of ways to think of her-jumped in, eyes gleaming. “Did you know that ‘factoid’ actually means false? Originally. Its meaning has…migrated, if you will, so the dictionary now accepts ‘small fact’ as one of its definitions. I was kind of disappointed in that. I think language should hold the line, not allow its own corruption.”

“I’m not here to talk about language.”

“Okay, here’s what you want. Up Interstate 83, just over the Pennsylvania line, the first exit, up around Shrewsbury. It wasn’t very developed then, and street names may have changed. But there was a farm on something called Old Town Road, which ran from Glen Rock to Shrewsbury, all the way to York. The farm used a P.O. box to get its mail, but there was a mailbox at the foot of the drive, and the number was 13350. The driveway is a mile long, almost exactly. The house was stone, the door was painted bright red. There was a barn. Not far from the barn was an orchard. You’ll find my sister’s grave there, beneath a cherry tree.”

“How many cherry trees are there?”

“Several, and there were other kinds of trees mixed in as well. Apple and pear, a few dogwoods for color. Over time, when I wasn’t being observed, I managed to scratch a random pattern into the bark. Not her initials. That would have been noticed. Just a little ring of X ’s.”

“We’re talking thirty years ago. The tree could be gone. The house could be gone. Earth moves .”

“But property records remain. And if you research the address I’ve given you, then I’m confident that you’ll find a name you’ll be able to cross-reference with the personnel files of the Baltimore County Police Department.”

“Why not just tell me the fuckin’ name of the man who did this to you?”

“I want you to believe me. I want you to see the farm, see his name on the records, then match it with your own files. I want you to have my sister’s bones. Then when you find him-if you find him, he could be dead for all I know-you’ll know that much is true.”

“Why not go there with us and show me? Wouldn’t that be simpler, and faster?” Or is simple and fast the one thing you don’t want, girlie? What are you stalling for? What’s your angle ?

“That,” she said, “is the one thing I will never do. Not even after almost twenty-five years. I never want to see that place again.”

He believed that much-but only that much. The fear in her face was real, the shudder in her shoulders visible even beneath the shawl. She could not stomach the thought of this journey. Wherever she’d been headed Tuesday night, it wasn’t Pennsylvania.

But that still didn’t mean that she was Heather Bethany.

Heather wrinkled up her nose the moment she crossed the threshold into the Forrest house.

“I’m allergic to cats,” she told Kay, speaking as if Kay were a dim-witted real-estate agent. “This won’t work.”

“But I thought you understood-I told you my son, Seth, was earning extra money by looking after the family’s plants and pets.”

“I guess I heard only the plant part. I’m sorry, but-” She turned her head and sneezed, a dainty, dry sneeze. A catlike sneeze, in fact. “In just minutes I’ll be all red and puffy. I couldn’t possibly stay here.”

Her cheeks did seem to be reddening, her eyes watering. Kay followed Heather back outside, onto the fieldstone porch on the front of the house. A black woman was walking down the street with her daughter, and although the girl was astride a bike with training wheels, she was outrageously well dressed in a pale yellow pinafore and matching shoes. The mother wore a complementary shade of celery green. She turned to study the two women on the porch, clearly suspicious of them. A neighbor, Cynthia something. Mrs. Forrest had said she was a one-woman neighborhood watch, that she wouldn’t have worried about the house at all during their vacation if it weren’t for the plants and the cat, Felix. Kay waved, hoping the gesture would reassure the woman, but she did not wave back or even smile, just narrowed her eyes and nodded curtly as if in warning. I see you. I’ll remember you if anything happens .