Laura Lippman - What The Dead Know

Who cares if I live or die?

No one , Hope admitted. But when you die, who will remember them? Miriam? Willoughby ? Their old classmates, some of whom have graduated college by now? You’re all they have, Dave. Without you, they truly are gone .

Miriam had a secret love-butter pecan yogurt from I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt. She could, in fact, believe it was yogurt. She further believed that it wasn’t quite the health food that others seemed to think, and that its calories counted as much as any other calories. Miriam wasn’t deceived by any of the promises made by I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt, real or implied. But she liked it, and she was sorely tempted to take a small detour right now and buy some. The day was warm, summer-hot by her standards if not by Texas ones, hot enough to make an afternoon at Barton Springs seem eminently reasonable. Miriam thought about taking the afternoon off and doing just that, or going all the way out to the lake, but she had two appointments with prospective sellers in the Clarksville section.

Still, it worried her that she’d considered, even for a moment, driving over to the public swimming area. She had really settled in here. If she didn’t watch it, she’d soon be joining the local chorus of “But you should have lived here when-” The endless lament about how hip, how happy, how affordable Austin used to be. Then there was the invocation of the places that used to exist-the Armadillo, the Liberty Lunch. Look at Guadalupe Street, the Drag, where she couldn’t find a parking spot today. She’d have to forgo the yogurt and continue on to her appointment.

A shiver ran through her, and she worked backward through her thoughts to find what was making her feel anxious. Parking- Austin -Barton Springs- lake . There had been a murder at the lake last fall, two girls, found on a lot where an expensive new house was under construction. Two girls-not sisters, but the mere configuration demanded her attention-and no possible motive that anyone could discern. Miriam, more expert than others in reading between the lines of news accounts, understood that the police really did have no information, but her friends had inferred all sorts of strange conspiracies from the barest of facts. Trained by television, they kept expecting it to turn into a story , something explicable and-although her earnest Austin friends would never use this word- satisfying . To them, obsessed with the way Austin was changing-mutating, the old-timers said; growing and progressing, according to the newcomers who had staked their fortunes on this booming city-the murders must somehow be rooted in the phenomenon of growth. The girls were locals, biker chicks of a sort, from families who had lived in the area before it was desirable. According to news reports, they had long used this cove off Lake Travis for partying with their friends and saw no reason to stop simply because a house was going up. It seemed to Miriam that the girls were most likely killed by their own surly acquaintances, but police had interviewed the lot’s owner and the various workmen from the site.

In focusing on the clash between old and new, progress and status quo, Miriam’s Austin friends didn’t realize that they were really arguing for their own connection to the crime, that they were trying to take an isolated horror and make it-loathsome word-relatable. Which was, of course, the one thing it could never be, not in liberal Austin. Austin was so sweetly, reliably liberal that Miriam was beginning to wonder just how liberal she really was.

Take the death penalty, which had resumed in Texas the year before. There was much discussion among her coworkers and neighbors about how shameful this was, how unbecomingly eager Texas was to put men to death now that Utah had led the way, although only one man had been executed so far. Miriam never joined in these discussions, because she was afraid that she would find herself arguing heatedly for it, which could lead to the trump card of personal experience, something she never wanted to lay on the table. Since her arrival in Texas seven years earlier, she had been allowed the luxury of not being the martyred mother, poor sad Miriam Bethany. She was, in fact, no longer Miriam Bethany. She was Miriam Toles. Even if someone were to know of the Bethany girls, if the names were to come up in the endless speculating about the double murders at Lake Travis, no one would make the connection. She had even glossed over the Baltimore part of her past. Bad marriage, didn’t work out, no children, thank God, originally from Ottawa , much prefer the climate here . That was what people knew about her.

There had been moments-wine-soaked or pot-infused camaraderie, usually late at night-when Miriam flirted with the idea of confiding in someone. Never a man, because although she found it remarkably easy to meet and bed men, she did not want a boyfriend of any stripe, and that kind of revelation might inspire a man to take her seriously. But she had made female friends, including one, Rose, who hinted at her own secrets. An anthropology student at thirty-seven-Austin was filled with people who seemed determined to spend their lives as students-she had stayed late after a party, taking Miriam up on her offer to get into the backyard hot tub. As they worked through a bottle of wine, she began to speak of a remote village in Belize where she’d lived for several years. “It was surreal,” she said. “After living there I’m not so sure that magical realism is a literary style. I just think those guys are writing the truth.” Rape was alluded to, vaguely, but all the personal pronouns seemed to drop from Rose’s speech, and it was impossible to know if she was the victim or a bystander who had failed to act. She and Miriam danced around the flames of their respective pasts, each casting beautiful shadows that allowed the other to draw whatever conclusions she wished. But they hadn’t gotten so personal again, much to Miriam’s relief, and possibly to Rose’s. In fact, they had barely seen each other at all.

At the next stoplight, Miriam flipped open her Filofax in the passenger seat and glanced at the address for the first appointment. A man on the street stared at her, and she had an awareness of herself as a self-made woman, although not in the usual sense of the phrase. True, she had done well financially, starting with very little here. The camel-colored Filofax, the Joan Vass knits and shoes, the air-conditioned Saab-these details allowed her to broadcast her success in an Austin-appropriate way. But Miriam was more interested in the creation of this different person, Miriam Toles, who was allowed to move through her days without tragedy tugging visibly at everything she did. It was hard enough to be Miriam Bethany on the inside. Miriam Toles was the candy-coated shell, the thin layer that kept all the messy stuff inside, just barely.

“They do melt,” Heather had complained, showing her mother a palm smeared with orange, yellow, red, and green. “How can they lie like that?”

“All commercials lie,” said Sunny, a sage at eleven. “Remember when we ordered the one hundred dolls from the back of the Millie the Model comic, and they were so teensy?” She held her fingers apart to show how small the dolls were, how large the lie.

Her car still idling at the light, Miriam’s eyes fell on the date: March 29. The day. That day. It was the first time she had ever managed to ease into it without an overweening awareness, the first time that she had not gone to sleep dreading the so-called anniversary, the first time she had not awakened bathed in the sweat of vicious nightmares. It helped that Austin springs were so different, that it was verging on hot by late March. It helped that Easter had come and gone, early again. Easter was usually the sign that she’d passed into what she thought of as the safe season. If they were alive-oh Lord, if they were alive, Sunny would be twenty-three, Heather verging on twenty.