Laura Lippman - What The Dead Know

What a brilliant excuse , Kay thought. She pinned it on someone that no one knows, that no one would think to question .

It took a split second, but the larger implications of this observation seemed to vibrate beneath her tires as she merged onto the long, sweeping exit to Security Boulevard.

“I THOUGHT THINGS got smaller as you aged,” Heather said. “This seems larger. Did they expand it?”

They were standing in a corridor where, according to Heather, the movie theater, all two screens, had once been. For a Saturday the mall was severely underpopulated, and while it had some of the usual offerings-Old Navy, a chain music store, a Sears, and a Hecht’s-the other stores were unknown to Kay, and there was a general sense of abandonment. In one corner a former department store-Hoschild’s, Heather insisted-had been deconstructed, its walls torn away so that only its escalators remained. These now took shoppers to an Asian food court. There must be a big Asian population in the area, for the name Seoul Plaza had been affixed to the facade of the mall’s south end. Kay found the Seoul Plaza part vaguely hopeful, a sign of how things changed and adapted. It was exciting, on one level, that this section of Baltimore County needed such a specialty store. But she wasn’t much of a fan of malls in particular, and this one was so forlorn, so seedy and forgotten.

She wondered what it looked like to Heather.

“You could smell the Karmelkorn even here,” Heather was saying now. “It filled this central area. That’s where we were supposed to meet that day.”

Heather began to walk, head down, as if there were clues to follow. Upon reaching the mall’s atrium, she turned right. “The organ store was up here, near the bookstore. The sewing supplies-Singer, not Jo-Ann-were the other way, along with Harmony Hut. We were supposed to meet our father at the health food store, the GNC, at five-thirty. He bought brewer’s yeast there, and sesame candy. It was pretty here then. Full of people, festive.”

It was as if Heather were prepping, reviewing information for a test. But if she was Heather Bethany, why would she worry about having the right answers? And if she wasn’t, she must see that the mall was so changed that no one could check her memories of it, contradict her recollections?

“Mall security,” she said, stopping to inspect a glassed-in booth with uniformed men staring at a variety of screens, and Kay wondered if she was thinking that such men might have saved her, thirty years ago. “This is where Karmelkorn-No, no, no . I’m turned around. The new wing, with Hecht’s, threw me off. It’s not that the mall has gotten larger but that I was confused about the layout, transposed the two corridors.”

She began moving so fast that Kay almost had to jog to keep up with her. “The movie theaters would have been down here,” she said, skidding to a stop, then turning around, her pace picking right back up. “And if we go right here-yes, now it makes sense. The place where those escalators are, that wasn’t Hoschild’s but the J. C. Penney, which was still under construction that weekend. Here-this was the organ store, where Mr. Pincharelli worked on weekends.”

“Here” was now something called Kid-Go-Round, a store that apparently catered to children who needed the equivalent of prom clothes, for weddings and the like. Next door was a store called Touch of the Past, which Kay found eerie until she realized that it sold Negro League memorabilia, expensive jerseys for teams such as the Homestead Grays and the Atlanta Black Crackers.

“Mr. Pincharelli?” Kay asked.

“The music teacher at Rock Glen Junior High. Sunny had the biggest crush on him for a while.”

Heather stood transfixed, rocking slightly, humming again as she had in the car, hugging herself as if she were cold. “Look at those dresses,” she said. “Flower girls, junior attendants. Did you have that kind of wedding?”

“Not quite,” Kay said, smiling at the memory. “We married outdoors, in the backyard of a friend’s house on the Severn River, and I wore flowers in my hair. It was the eighties,” she added with a note of apology. “And I was all of twenty-three.”

“I’m never going to marry, not for real.” Heather’s tone was not regretful or self-pitying, merely factual.

“Well, then at least you’ll never have to get divorced,” Kay said.

“My parents divorced, didn’t they? I didn’t get that at first. They split up. Do you think it’s my fault?”

“Your fault?”

“Well, not my fault, obviously. But a consequence of what…happened. Do you think grief drove them apart?”

“I think,” Kay said, picking her words with as much precision as possible, “that grief, tragedy, tends to magnify whatever is there, expose the fissures that are already there. Strong marriages get stronger. Weak ones suffer and, without help, may fall apart. In my experience.”

“Are you saying my parents didn’t have a good marriage before?” Her tone was fierce, straight from the schoolyard, the instinctive defense against even an implied insult against one’s parents.

“I wouldn’t know. I couldn’t know. I was speaking in generalities, Heather.”

Again the smile, the reward for using her name, for being the one who believed in her, perhaps even more than Gloria, whose dedication was billed hourly. “I thought everyone was dead. I just assumed everyone was dead. Except me.”

Kay trained her eyes on the gossamer skirts in the windows, the heartbreaking kind of girly-girl dresses that her own Grace had never wanted to wear. I just assumed everyone was dead . If they were, it would be much easier to carry the lie. But would someone tell a lie like this just to get out of being charged in a traffic accident? If that were the case, now that she knew the little boy was going to be okay, couldn’t she simply recant? She was so credible, yet the very fact that Kay was thinking along those lines might be the proof of how studied this all was.

Staring straight ahead, Kay could see Heather’s reflection in the plate-glass window of where the organ store had once been. Tears were coursing down her face, and she was shaking so hard that her teeth, her perfect, no-cavity teeth, were chattering uncontrollably.

“It began here,” she said. “In its own way, it began here.”

The business section of St. Simons-the “village,” according to a local who helped Kevin find his way there-was lousy with charm.

The main drag was lined with precious shops, the kind that specialized in selling useless things to people who shopped reflexively, as entertainment. It wasn’t the high-end, name-brand type of shopping you saw in the Hamptons, where Kevin had worked landscaping jobs as a teenager, but it was a big step up from Brunswick. He understood now why Penelope Jackson had lived on the mainland, how out-of-reach the real estate must be for the people who scooped the ice cream, poured the beers, sold the pink-and-green dresses that seemed to dominate the window displays.

He had timed his visit to Mullet Bay for the late-afternoon rush, before the dinner hour started in earnest. The bar-restaurant was a typical resort establishment, another variation on the American dream, Jimmy Buffett version. Parrots, tropical drinks, no-worries-mon. It was hard to figure out how a going-on-forty woman had fit in here, a young person’s joint where the waitstaff, male and female, wore shorts and polos. But the manager, a dark-eyed honey of a girl with glowing skin, cleared that up by explaining that Penelope was one of the line cooks.

“She was great,” she said with a peppy enthusiasm that seemed to be her default setting, pronouncing it “graaaa-ate.” The plastic bar pinned above her perfect left tit proclaimed her to be Heather, and the coincidence seemed a portent of…well, something . Then again, Heather was a pretty popular name. “Good worker, very reliable. Would fill in at the last minute, even bartended once or twice when the regular guy didn’t show. The bosses would have dearly loved to keep her.”