Laura Lippman - What The Dead Know

“Why?” asked Seth. She liked him, him and Grace, too, almost in spite of herself. She despised most children, resented them in fact. But there was a sweetness about Kay’s kids, a kindness inherited or learned from their mother. They were solicitous of Kay, too, perhaps a byproduct of the divorce.

“We didn’t know better. And thirty years from now you’ll probably be saying the same thing to someone else young, who can’t believe the things you said and did and wore and thought.”

She could tell from Seth’s expression that he wasn’t persuaded, but he was too polite to contradict her. His generation was going to get it right, be perfect in every way, unlock every mystery. After all, they had iPods. It seemed to make them think that anything was possible, that they would be able to control life the way they controlled and managed their music, flipping around on a little track wheel. Right, sweetie. It was just one big playlist waiting to be designed, the brave new world of Tivo. What you wanted, when you wanted, all the time.

“We shouldn’t be more than an hour,” Kay said.

“Don’t worry about me.” Or, as Uncle used to say, “Don’t go away mad, just go .”

Left alone in the house, she turned on the television in the den and forced herself to sit through some amazingly stupid program for ten minutes. Kids always forgot something, she figured, but after you’d been in the car for ten minutes, the item would have to be critical for a parent to turn back. When the program went into its second commercial break, she turned on the family computer. No passwords, no passwords, no passwords , she prayed, and of course there weren’t. The poky little Dell was wide open. She would leave tracks, that was unavoidable, but who would think to hunt for them here? Working quickly, she scanned her e-mail via the Web, looking for anything urgent. She then e-mailed her supervisor, explaining that there’d been an accident and a family emergency-true enough, she was her own family-and she’d left town suddenly. She sent it, then immediately quit her e-mail program in case her supervisor was online and fired back a fast reply. Then, although she knew it was risky, she began to type “Heather Bethany” into the Google search engine.

H-e-Two letters in, Google offered her own search back to her. Why, that nosy little Kay. She had been doing quite a bit of extracurricular homework over the past few days. It made her feel better somehow, knowing that Kay wasn’t quite so noble and helpful, that she was capable of base curiosity. She scanned the history, curious to see where Kay’s searches had taken her, but it was all the obvious places, the basic ones. Kay had gone into the Beacon-Light archives but balked at paying the fees. No matter; she had those stories practically memorized. There was the missing-children site, with those eerie aged photographs, the basic facts. And a really creepy blog maintained by some man in Ohio, purporting to have solved the Bethany case. O-kay.

How she wished that Kay, as a social worker, had access to some secret government files, where confidential details were stored. But of course no such place existed, and if it had, she would have found it on her own and hacked her way into it. She had exhausted the available computer resources ages ago.

Reluctantly, she disconnected from the Internet and turned the screen back off. She missed her computer. Until this moment she had never pondered her relationship with it, never acknowledged to herself how many hours a day she spent staring into screens. But this bit of self-knowledge, now that she had it, didn’t feel pathetic. Quite the opposite. She liked computers, their logic and tidiness. In the past few years, she had snorted with laughter at all the concern over the Internet, how it could be used to gain access to underage girls and boys, how it increased the reach of child pornography, as if the world had been so safe before computers came along. If her missteps had started with an IM conversation, her parents would have had a chance of catching it. Instead she had been out in the world, talking to somebody one-on-one, and that’s where the trouble all began, with a simple conversation, the most innocent conversation that anyone could imagine.

Do you like this song?

What?

Do you like this song?

Yes . She didn’t, really. It wasn’t at all the kind of song she liked, but the conversation-the conversation was something else, something she hoped would never end. Yes, I do .

And, finally, the phone rang.

That’s how Miriam would remember the moment. She started creating the memory even as it was happening to her, revising the present in the present. Later she would tell herself that she sensed the momentousness of the call in the dull, flat ring itself, which came as she was setting the table for a supper. But it was really a few seconds later, after a man cleared his throat and began to speak in those strange Baltimore vowel sounds, odd and jarring and yet familiar to her ear after all these years, that she knew.

They had found them.

They had found bodies, and it might be them.

Another lunatic had started babbling in jail, desperate for a deal, or just attention.

They had found them.

Bodies found, them be might it.

Lunatic in jail babbling long shot but hear him out have to.

Them found had they.

Sunny. Heather. Dave dead, poor dead Dave, not here for the end of the story. Or was he lucky Dave, spared from hearing a truth that he could never quite admit to himself?

They had found them.

“Miriam Bethany?” It was the “ Bethany ” that gave it away. There was only one context in which she remained Miriam Bethany.

“Yes?”

“My name is Harold Lenhardt, and I’m a sergeant with the Baltimore County Police Department.”

Found them, found them, found them.

“A few days ago, a woman was in a car accident, and when police came to the scene, she said-”

Lunatic, lunatic, another fucking lunatic. Another crazy, indifferent to the pain and hurt she was causing.

“That she’s your daughter. The younger one, Heather. She says she’s your daughter.”

And Miriam’s mind exploded.

The telephone rang at 6:30 A.M. and Dave grabbed the receiver without thinking. He knew better. Just last week, in anticipation of this annual call, he had purchased a PhoneMate answering machine at Wilson ’s, the catalog store on Security Boulevard. They supposedly had lower prices, although Dave could never tell for sure, because he didn’t have the patience to comparison-shop. Still, as a fellow retailer, albeit on a much smaller scale, he was interested in how the store reduced overhead by keeping salespeople to a minimum and not stocking inventory on the floor. Shoppers jotted down the codes of the items they wanted, stood in one line to pick them up, another to purchase. Perhaps the trick was that such an onerous system simply made people believe they were getting a deal. All the waiting in line-it had to pay off somehow, right? The Soviets lined up for toilet paper, Americans queued for PhoneMates and WaterPiks and fourteen-karat-gold necklaces.

Answering machines were new, a technology that had caught fire in the wake of the AT & T breakup, and now suddenly everyone was getting them-recording silly messages, performing skits, even singing in some cases. It turned out that the United States was a desperately lonely place, where everyone had been worrying that a single missed phone call might change one’s destiny. The old Dave, the before Dave, would have gone as long as possible before succumbing to a gadget such as this, if ever. But there was always the chance that someone might call once and never call again. And then there were the calls you didn’t want to take, and the machine allowed you to listen to those, decide for yourself if you wanted to talk to the real person. Dave hadn’t worked out the etiquette of that yet-once you revealed to someone that you had eavesdropped on the incoming message, how could you ever fail to take that person’s call again? Or did you just pretend that you weren’t there? Maybe it would be better never to answer. It had taken him almost three hours to come up with his outgoing message. “ This is Dave Bethany, and I’m not at home now-” Not necessarily true, and he didn’t like to lie, even to strangers, much less encourage burglars. “ You have reached the Bethany household-” But there was no Bethany household, just a single Bethany in an increasingly neglected house, where nothing was broken, but nothing really worked as it should. “ This is Dave. Leave your message at the beep .” Unoriginal, but it got the job done.