Laura Lippman - What The Dead Know

The PhoneMate was set to ring four times before it answered, and Dave, groggy from the dreamless sleep that he now considered a blessing, reached out blindly and grabbed the receiver. At the split second he lifted it to his ear, he remembered the date, the very reason he’d made a point of purchasing the PhoneMate. Too late.

“I know where they are,” said a man’s voice, raspy and thin.

“Fuck you,” Dave said, slamming down the phone, but not before he registered the sound of a fist, furiously working.

These calls had started four years earlier and were always the same, at least in the way they were worded. The voice sounded different from year to year, and Dave had figured out that the annual caller suffered from allergies, which affected the timbre. Did the obscene caller sound hoarse this year? Spring must be precocious, pollen already in the air. The guy was his personal groundhog. His PhoneMate .

Dutifully, Dave recorded the date, time, and content of the call on the pad he kept by the telephone. Detective Willoughby said he should report everything, even hang-up calls, but although Dave kept a record, he had never confided in Willoughby about this particular rite of spring. “Let us decide what’s important,” Willoughby had told him many times over the last eight years, but Dave couldn’t live that way. He needed to make distinctions, if only for his own sanity. Hope was an impossible emotion to live with, he was finding out, a demanding and abusive companion. Emily Dickinson had called it the thing with feathers, but her hope was small and dainty, a friendly presence perched inside the rib cage. The hope that Dave Bethany knew also had feathers, but it was more of a griffin, with glinting eyes and sharp talons. Claws , he corrected himself. The griffin had the head of an eagle but the body of a lion. Dave Bethany’s version of hope sat on his chest, working its claws in and out, piercing the meaty surface of his heart.

He didn’t need to leave bed for at least another hour, but it was useless to try to return to sleep. He got up, shuffled out to grab the newspaper, and started boiling water for his coffee. Dave had always insisted on a using a Chemex for coffee, no matter how Miriam wheedled for an electric maker, which had become all the rage when Joe DiMaggio started pitching them. Now the food-obsessed, a decadent class in Dave’s opinion, were returning to the old ways of making coffee, although they ground their beans in little domed machines that whirred with pompous ceremony, oversize dildos for the gourmet fetishist. See , he said to his invisible breakfast partner as he poured the steaming water over the grounds. I told you everything comes around again .

He had never broken the habit of speaking to Miriam over breakfast. In fact, he enjoyed it more since she’d left, for there were no contradictions, no teasing or doubt. He held forth, and Miriam silently agreed with everything he said. He couldn’t imagine a more satisfactory arrangement.

He scanned the Beacon ’s local section. No mention of the date’s significance, but that was to be expected. There’d been a story at one year, again at two years, but nothing after that. It had puzzled him, when year five came and went without any acknowledgment. When would his daughters matter again? At ten years, at twenty? At their silver anniversary, or their gold?

“The media’s done what it can,” Willoughby had said just last month as they watched crews digging holes on an old farm out toward Finksburg.

“Still, if only from a historical standpoint, the fact that it happened…” The countryside was beautiful here. Why had he never come to Finksburg before, seen how beautiful it was despite its bum name? But the highway had been extended to this part of the county only recently. Before the road construction, it would have been impossible to live here and work in town.

“At this point it’s going to come down to an arrest,” Willoughby had said as the day wore on and more holes were dug, and the detective gave up on the enterprise in progress. “Someone who knows something and will want to use it as a bartering chip. Or perhaps the guy himself. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s already in custody for another crime. There are lots of unsolved cases that have gotten all the publicity in the world-Etan Patz, Adam Walsh.”

“They came after ,” Dave said, as if this were an issue of primogeniture. “And Adam Walsh’s parents at least have a body.”

“They have a head,” Willoughby said, his pedantic nature coming to the fore. “They never found the body.”

“You know what? I’d kill for a head at this point.”

The call about that Finksburg farm had been so promising. For one thing, it had come from a woman, and while women in general were no more sane than men, they did not have the kind of craziness that sought release in taunting the family of two presumed murder victims. Besides, this was a neighbor, a woman who had provided her full name. A man named Lyman Tanner had moved to the area in the spring of 1975, just before the girls disappeared. She recalled him washing his car very early on Easter Sunday, the day after the girls disappeared, which struck her as odd, because rain was in the forecast.

She had been asked, Willoughby reported back to Dave, why she would remember such a detail eight years later.

“Simple,” said the woman, Yvonne Yepletsky. “I’m Orthodox-Romanian Orthodox, but I go to the Greek Orthodox church downtown, like most of the Romanian Orthodox. On our calendar Easter falls on a different day, and my mother used to say it always rains on their Easter. And sure enough it usually does.”

Still, the oddness of that car wash did not come back to her until a few months ago, when Lyman Tanner died and left his farm to some distant relatives. Yvonne Yepletsky remembered then that her neighbor had worked at Social Security, so close to the mall, and that he had seemed unusually interested in her own daughters, young teenagers when he first moved in next door. He hadn’t even minded the old graveyard bordering his property, which had deterred so many other buyers.

“And he made a big to-do about putting in crops, rented a tractor and all to till up the field, but then he never done nothing with it,” Mrs. Yepletsky said.

The Baltimore County Police Department hired a bulldozer.

The crew was on its twelfth hole when another neighbor helpfully informed them that Mrs. Yepletsky was disgruntled because her husband wanted to buy the land and Tanner’s heirs wouldn’t sell. The Yepletskys weren’t liars, not quite. They had come to believe the stories they told about Tanner. A man whose heirs wouldn’t sell to you for a good price-why, he must be odd. He had washed his car when rain was in the forecast. Wasn’t that about the time those girls had disappeared? He musta done it . Hope, which had moved to Dave’s shoulder for all of a week, settled back on his chest, kneading its claws in and out.

Given that his breakfast consisted solely of black coffee, Dave required only twenty minutes to finish it and the paper, rinse out his cup, and head upstairs to get dressed. It was barely 7:00 A.M. Three hundred and sixty-four days of the year, he kept his daughters’ bedroom doors closed, but he always opened them on this day, allowed himself a little tour. He felt not unlike Bluebeard in reverse. If a woman were to join him in this house-unimaginable to him, but theoretically possible-he would forbid her to enter these rooms. She would, of course, defy him and sneak in behind his back. But instead of discovering the corpses of his previous wives, she would find preserved time capsules of two girls’ lives, April 1975.