Laura Lippman - What The Dead Know

“So you turn and you see this guy-what did he look like?”

“He was just an old guy to me. Very short hair, gray and brown. Ordinary-looking. He was in his fifties, but I’d only find that out later. At the time the only thing I thought was, He’s old.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He asked if I was Heather Bethany. He knew my name.”

“And did that seem strange to you?”

“No. I was a kid. Grown-ups were always knowing things about me that I didn’t know how they knew them. Grown-ups were like gods. Back then.”

“Did you know him?”

“No, but he showed me his badge, right away, told me he was a police officer.”

“What did the badge look like?”

“I don’t know. A badge. He wasn’t wearing a uniform, but he had a badge, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me to doubt anything he said.”

“Which was?”

“‘Your sister’s been hurt. Come with me.’ So I went. I followed him down a corridor, where the restrooms were. There was an exit back there, marked ‘For Emergencies Only,’ but it was an emergency, so it made sense to me that we were going that way, rather than the usual entrances.”

“Did an alarm sound?”

“An alarm?”

“You walk out doors marked Emergency Exit Only, an alarm usually sounds.”

“I don’t remember one. Maybe he disabled it. Maybe there wasn’t one. I don’t know.”

“The corridor was…where?”

“Between the center atrium and Sears. It was where the restrooms were, and also where they did the surveys.”

“Surveys?”

“Consumer stuff. Sunny told me about it. You could get, like, five dollars for answering questions. But you had to be at least fifteen, so I never got to do it.”

8:40 P.M.

Infante slipped into the room where Willoughby and Lenhardt were watching the interrogation.

“You’re supposed to be at the airport, waiting for the mom,” Lenhardt said to him, but not in a mean, ballbusting way, not to Willoughby ’s ears.

“I got in early, and she’s going to be at least two hours late according to the monitors. I thought I had time to run up here, see how things were going.”

“ Nancy ’s doing good,” Lenhardt said. “She’s taking her time. She’s had her going almost four hours now, and she keeps bringing her up to the edge of the actual kidnapping, then going back to the beginning. It’s driving her crazy. She’s bursting to tell us the bad shit, for some reason.”

Infante glanced at his watch. “I’ll have to leave for the airport by nine-thirty. You think I’ll catch the main show?”

Lenhardt balled his fists and rotated his wrists, peering at his clenched fingers. “Magic Eight Ball says all signs look good.”

8:50 P.M.

“So you’re outside, and…is it dark?”

“No, it’s still light. It’s March twenty-ninth. The days were getting longer. We got outside-”

“No alarm on the door?”

“No, no alarm on the door. And there was a van. He opened the door, and Sunny was inside. Before I could register anything-the fact that she was lying down, tied up, the fact that this wasn’t a police car-he had caught me up and thrown me back there. I fought, if you could call it that, a little girl flailing her arms at a grown man. But it was completely ineffectual. I wonder-do you think he got Sunny the same way, with the same story? How did he know us? Have you figured that out, Detective? How did Stan Dunham know us? Why did he target us?”

“Stan Dunham’s in a retirement community out in Sykesville.” A pause. “Did you know that?”

“It’s not as if we’re pen pals .” Said with dry disgust. Yet without worry, Willoughby noticed. Again, they had considered carefully what they would say about Dunham. They had no intention of telling her that he couldn’t contradict his own name at this point. But the fact that he was still alive didn’t seem to make as much of an impression as it should have. Even if she were telling the truth, shouldn’t she be more taken aback by the revelation that her captor, the man who had ruined her life, was just thirty miles west of where she sat?

“Okay, okay-when he grabbed you, did you…lose anything? Leave anything behind?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that. Did you leave anything behind?”

Her eyes widened. “The purse. Of course, I dropped my purse. How I mourned that purse. I know this will sound weird to you, but it was easier, in the back of that van, to worry about the purse than to think about…” She began to cry, and her lawyer handed her a tissue, although these were the kind of tears that no mere tissue could sop up, hard as rain.

“Can you describe the purse?”

“D-d-d-d-escribe it?” It was all Willoughby could do not to reach out and grab the sergeant’s hand. This was it, the moment that he and Nancy had planned this morning.

“Yes, could you describe it? Tell me what it looked like, what was in it?”

She appeared to be thinking, which didn’t seem right to Willoughby. She knew or she didn’t.

The lawyer spoke for the first time. “C’mon, Nancy. What does it matter if she can describe a purse she had when she was eleven?”

“She described her Snoopy watch in pretty definite detail.”

“It was thirty years ago. People do forget things. I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday-”

“Denim with red rickrack,” she said firmly, her voice rising over her lawyer’s. “Attached to a set of wooden handles by a set of white buttons. The purse had a muslin base, and you could attach various covers to change the look.”

“And what was in it?”

“Why…money, of course. And a little comb.”

“Not a key or a lipstick?”

“Sunny had the key, and I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup yet, just Bonne Belle.”

“That was the complete inventory of the purse?”

“What?”

“A little comb, Bonne Belle, and money. How much?”

“Hardly any. Maybe five dollars, less what I’d spent for the movie ticket. And I’m not sure I had a Bonne Belle. I just told you that’s all I was allowed to have. I can’t remember everything. God, do you even know what’s in your purse right now?”

“Billfold,” Nancy Porter said. “Tic Tacs. Diaper wipes. I have a six-month-old. Lipstick. Receipts-”

“Okay, you can. I can’t. Hey, when they stopped me Tuesday night, I didn’t even know why my billfold wasn’t in my purse.”

“We’ll get to that.”

9:10 P.M.

“So once in the van…”

“We drove. We drove and we drove. It seemed like a very long time, but maybe my sense of time was off. He stopped at some point and got out. We tried the door-”

“You weren’t tied up, like your sister?”

“No, he was in a hurry. He just grabbed me and threw me in. I have no idea how he subdued Sunny.”

“But you said, ‘We tried the door’-”

“I untied her, of course. I didn’t let her stay tied up. He stopped, we tried the door, it was locked from the outside. And there was mesh between the rear of the van and the passenger compartment, so we couldn’t get out that way.”

“Did you scream?”

She looked at Nancy blankly.

“While he was outside the van. Did you scream, try to draw attention to yourselves?”

“No. We didn’t know where we were, if there was anyone out there to hear us. And he had threatened us, told us horrible things would happen-so no, we didn’t scream.”

Nancy glanced at the tape recorder but didn’t speak. That was good, Willoughby thought. She was using silence as a goad, waiting the woman out.

“We were in the country. There were…crickets.”

“Crickets? In March?”

“Some strange sound. Strange to us. Perhaps it was the absence of sound.” She turned to Gloria. “Do I have to talk about this part in detail? Is it really necessary?” Then, without waiting for an answer, she began the story that she claimed to be so loath to tell. “He took us into this house in the middle of nowhere. A farmhouse. He wanted to…do things. Sunny fought him, and he killed her. I don’t think he meant to. He seemed surprised when it happened. Sad, even. Is that possible? That he could have been sad? Maybe he had always meant to kill us, kill both of us, but then it happened and he realized that killing wasn’t something he was equipped for. He killed her, and then he told me that I could never leave him. That I would have to stay with him and his family, be a part of it. And if I didn’t…well, if I didn’t, then he would have no choice but to do to me what he’d done to Sunny. She’s dead, he said. I can’t bring her back. But I can give you a new life, if you let me.”