Laura Lippman - What The Dead Know

The thought seemed to amuse her.

“I’m sorry, Heather,” Kay said, “but my kids and I live pretty close to the bone. And it’s just not right. I’m a social worker. There are lines that I can’t cross.”

“But you’re not my social worker, not really. All you did was find Gloria for me. Time will tell how that works out.”

“You don’t like Gloria?”

“It’s not about liking . I’m just not sure her self-interest aligns with mine. And forced to choose, who do you think she’ll pick?”

“Her client’s. Gloria is odd, I grant you, and she loves publicity for herself. But she’ll do things your way. As long as you’re not lying to her.”

Again the tapping motion, two fingers against her lips. It reminded Kay of the way young children once played Indian, making war whoops with their hands by beating a similar tattoo on the mouth. She wondered if children still did that, or if heightened sensitivity had meant the end of such games. Certain cultural icons did disappear. Alley Oop, for example, cavemen dragging their women around by the hair, and who could really feel nostalgia for that? Did Andy Capp and Flo still go at it in the comics? She hadn’t glanced at the comics page in years.

“C’mon, Kay. There’s got to be a solution.”

“Perhaps if I took Felix to our house?”

“No, this place is suffused with cat hair and dander. But what if you and the kids came here and I took your house?”

The very reasonableness with which Heather made this proposal floored Kay. She did not see it as an imposition, much less as odd. Kay was careful about throwing around clinical terms, but there was a shading of narcissism in Heather. Then again, perhaps that had been essential to her survival.

“No, Seth and Grace would not be agreeable to that. Like most kids, they’re creatures of routine. But-” She knew she was walking a fine line. Hell, she was crossing a thick one, agreeing to a breach that could get her in a lot of trouble at work. Still, she plunged ahead. “We have a small room, over our garage. Not heated, and not air-conditioned, but that shouldn’t be an issue this time of year, not with a space heater. It was set up as an office, but there’s a couch, a small bath with a shower. Perhaps you could stay there, at least until your mother arrives.”

It wouldn’t be more than a day or two, Kay reasoned. And she wasn’t Heather’s caseworker, not officially. This would be nothing more than a favor to Gloria. Besides, she couldn’t allow the police to lock Heather up. Jail would be devastating for a woman who’d spent much of her youth imprisoned.

“Do you think she’s rich?” Heather asked.

“What?”

“My mother. We never were, quite the opposite. But he said she’s living in Mexico -that seems kind of rich. Maybe I’m an heiress. I always wondered what happened to my dad’s business and the house, after he died. Sometimes I’d read those legal listings. You know, unclaimed bank accounts and safe-deposit boxes? But I never found one in my name. I guess he couldn’t put me in his will, with everyone thinking I was dead and all. I don’t know what happened to our college funds, not that there was that much in them.”

Kay felt the dampness of the stone seeping into her skirt, yet her palms were strangely hot and sweaty.

“And now she’s coming back, you say. I’m going to call Gloria, see what she thinks about all this. Maybe I should go in voluntarily tomorrow, give them the whole story after all. By then, they’ll be ready to believe me, I bet.”

Babies floated across the computer screen. No, not babies plural-just one baby, the baby, the only baby that mattered in the new millennium. Move over, Jesus , Kevin thought, Andrew Porter Jr. has come to town . And his now computer-savvy mother had fed endless images of him into the computer, so when it went into rest mode, the little Andy slide show began. Andy as a tiny infant, cradled by his impossibly huge father. Andy eating, Andy with a picture book, Andy squinting at a Christmas tree. His father’s genes were stamped all over the boy’s face and bulky body, but Kevin liked to think he saw Nancy Porter’s sweet skepticism in that squint. You’re saying there’s this guy, and he brings me presents? What’s in it for him? And what the hell does the tree have to do with any of it ?

“ Pennsylvania records are fucked,” Nancy said, moving her cursor so Andy disappeared and her computer opened on an archived Web page. “Or else I don’t get how they work. In Maryland all I need is the address and the county, and I can research a property going back years. I haven’t been able to find an equivalent page in Pennsylvania, though. The only hit I got on the address you gave me showed it was owned by an LLC, which sold the property a few years back.”

“An LLC?”

“Limited liability corporation, somebody’s small business. Mercer Inc. Could have been anything, from a produce stand to a cleaning service. But there’s no Mercer in our personnel records, so it must be the previous owner we want.”

Fair and pleasantly plump before motherhood, Nancy liked to say she was frankly fat now, but the issue of her weight didn’t seem to bother her as much. When she returned to work, she’d asked for the transfer to cold cases, a request that Infante had secretly disdained. It seemed dreary stuff to him, poring over old files and looking for lucky breaks-the witness who was finally ready to tell the truth after all these years, the spouse who was tired of keeping secrets. He could see why a new mom would want a job that guaranteed regular hours, but he wasn’t sure he considered it real police work. Nancy, however, had a knack for computers and an unerring sense for finding information without ever leaving her desk. The Goddess of Small Things, as Lenhardt had once dubbed her, she now tracked down the tiniest bits of data the way she’d once been able to spot a bullet casing at a hundred paces. She wasn’t used to being stymied, but the old Keystone State ’s record-keeping had thrown her for a loop.

“Probably a wild-goose chase,” Infante said as Nancy clicked to the map, showing him the location. “But I’ll go up there, see what gives, canvass neighbors.”

“Thirty years ago. Twenty-four, if she left in 1981 the way she claimed. Does anyone live in the same place that long, anymore?”

“We just need one. Preferably one nosy old busybody with a razor-sharp memory and a photo album.”

KEVIN HEADED NORTH, marveling at the steady stream of southbound traffic at midday. Lenhardt lived out this way, and he complained constantly about the drain of commuting. He spoke of it as a kind of war, a battle waged daily. So why do it ? Infante asked when he tired of the bitching. He got the usual answers: kids, schools, problems that an unencumbered guy didn’t know from.

He almost had, though. There’d been a scare, with his first wife. Or so they’d framed the incident in hindsight, when it became apparent that she wasn’t pregnant. A scare, a danger averted. He hadn’t really felt that way at the time, although he had cause to think of it that way later, when the marriage broke up. He’d been a little hopeful, actually, trying on the role of daddy in his head and feeling it fit pretty well. It was Tabitha who had been worried, fretting over her new job at the mortgage broker’s office, wondering what this would do to her plans to do real-estate closings. So they called it a scare, and she became more vigilant about protection. Then she just stopped having sex with him, and he started cheating on her. Which came first had been the chicken-or-the-egg debate at the center of their divorce. The thing that galled Infante was that even when Tabby conceded he was telling the truth, that he hadn’t fucked around until she stopped fucking, she refused to grant him cause and effect.