Laura Lippman - Every Secret Thing

“I go to… Towson,” she said, hoping it was the name of a high school.

“Yeah? My cousin goes there.” He said a name, but of course she didn’t know it. He named more names. She just kept shaking her head and shrugging her shoulders. Maybe it was good for him to think she was stupid and didn’t know anyone at high school.

“How is it,” he said at last, “that you go to Towson High, but your parents live over in Southwest Baltimore?”

She thought of the answer her doctor had told her she could use, when asked about her past. “It’s really complicated.”

“Oh, yeah, I know how that works. Use a fake address to get into a better school. I went to Calvert Hall myself.” He seemed pleased with himself, but it meant nothing to Ronnie.

They had been driving west-she could tell by the sun-and the landscape of houses had been shifting constantly, from very rich to very poor. They had passed a hospital, and the racetrack. She was keeping tabs because you never knew, Victoria said, where you might get put out. Now it looked like the neighborhood where Ronnie had grown up, except everyone on the street was black.

The driver-he had said his name was Bill-took several quick turns and they ended up on a narrow road along a stream. The car slowed, and Ronnie made sure she was holding the door handle, but there was no shoulder and he kept going. He passed through a neighborhood where all the houses were white, and Ronnie realized she knew it, that she was close to home. The houses began to peter out, and they were in a dense corridor of trees that were just beginning to bud. Somehow, the stream was now on the left side. When had they crossed it? Ronnie had not noticed a bridge. And then there was a barrier, a big sign saying the road was closed until further notice.

“Well, I’ll be,” her driver said. “I forgot they closed this off.”

But he didn’t try to turn around, just put the car in park and reached across her to the glove compartment, opening it and taking out a small bottle of clear liquid. If it had not been for the black bag on her lap, he would have rubbed his arm against Ronnie’s breasts. Instead, he had to settle for brushing against nylon.

“This is Leakin Park,” she said. “My house is just on the other side of these hills.”

“Right. But we’ll have to backtrack, go the long way around via Forest Park.”

“Why is the road closed?”

His hand was in his lap, the tip of his tongue protruded between his lips, but he was otherwise the same shiny-faced man who had picked her up, the man named Bill who had gone to Calvert Hall, whose cousin had gone to Towson High.

“They’re building some kind of walkway. They call it a nature trail, but Jungle Land would be more like it. Or Baltimore Safari. Walk through Leakin Park, see if you come out alive. They could make one of those reality TV shows about it.”

“Why is it unsafe?” Ronnie had played along the edges of Leakin Park when she was as little as seven, and ventured farther and farther inside as she got older. Of course, she didn’t have permission, but she had never felt scared there.

“Because that’s a bad neighborhood up on that hill.”

“Oh. I thought it was because-well, I heard something really bad happened here once.”

“Like a ghost story? You want to tell me a ghost story, honey? Come sit on my lap and tell me your story. Tell Uncle Bill your story.”

She hugged her bag tighter to her chest.

“Show me your titties, Alice.” For that was the name she had given him, when he asked about high school. Alice Manning. Alice Manning, Alice Manning, Alice Manning. It was the first time Ronnie had to make up a name for herself, and she automatically said, Alice Manning.

“Show me your titties, and I’ll take you the rest of the way home. Just pull up your shirt, show me those pretty little things. I won’t touch ’em. I promise I won’t touch ’em.”

“I’m fourteen,” she said.

“Oh, I don’t think so. You walk like you’ve been fucked a time or two. You’ve been a bad girl, haven’t you? Tell Uncle Bill. Tell Uncle Bill what you let the boys do to you.”

His hand was beginning to move in his lap, but his voice was still dreamy and pleasant.

“You’re a bad, bad girl,” he crooned. “I know all about you.”

“I’m not.”

Her voice was shrill and hard, the angriest voice she had allowed herself in quite some time. She tried to rein it in. “But I know someone who was-who is. I’ll tell you what she did.”

“Tell Uncle Bill, baby. Tell Uncle Bill.”

“There were two little girls-”

“Oh, that’s a good story, Alice.”

“And they found a baby. A baby whose mother didn’t love her, who left her all alone on the front porch. They took her away from her mother and they made a…safe place for her. But the baby was sick, all along, she was going to die anyway. And the girls-well, one of the girls-got scared and said they had to take her back. But the other girl said no, that they couldn’t, that they had to kill the baby because no one would believe them anyway.”

His hand had stopped moving.

“It really happened,” Ronnie said. “Right here, seven years ago. I know the girls who did it. They went to my school.”

“I thought you went to Towson.”

“My school before,” Ronnie said, staring him straight in the eye. “Middle school.”

The man’s face was now gray-white instead of red, although still quite sweaty. He wiped his hand on his pants leg, turned the key in the ignition, and said to Ronnie: “Tell me again where you live.”

And so she had arrived home on the hottest March day in history, thirty dollars richer, and she hadn’t had to do a thing. She had sat on her bed, thinking about her choices. She could have gone downstairs and seen what was in the refrigerator. She could have turned on the television in her parents’ room, flopped across the bed on her stomach. She could have taken a walk, headed down the street to the convenience store. The store stood where her old street and her new street met, a hinge between the old life and the new.

Instead, she had decided to take the gift-wrapped box from her bag and open it. The square box had a sticker on it: Port Discovery: The Kids’ Museum . Ronnie didn’t remember such a place from when she was a kid. Back then, all the museums had been boring adult ones, full of vases.

The box yielded, from layers and layers of spun cotton, a collection of key rings, all with little toys attached. A tiny replica of the old Operation game, the board from Life, the bald man with magnetic hair to be arranged and rearranged. The final ring held a miniature Etch-a-Sketch. The counselor had painstakingly written on its tiny surface: “Good luck, Ronnie.”

She had also enclosed a note: “I wasn’t sure which one you’d like best, so I got you all of them.” Nice, she was nice. But why a key ring? It seemed a weird gift. And then Ronnie had understood. For the first time in seven years, she would have keys. She would open her own doors, and close them behind her.

It was April now, and that Etch-a-Sketch, long wiped clean, was in her hand, clenched so her keys-just two, to the front door lock and the dead bolt-dug into her palms. She was in the old block, walking past the Mannings’ house. She could not risk slowing down, or even staring openly. It was early, anyway, and Helen often slept until noon on Saturdays. But if their paths did cross, if she saw Ronnie and said hello, then Ronnie could ask, as if it had just occurred to her, as if she had not thought about it almost every day for the last seven years: Do you remember the honeysuckle?

She knew Helen would.

Wagner’s Tavern had become the county homicide detectives’ bar of choice by way of becoming a police scene. An SUV crammed with five screaming teenagers took the curve outside the bar at 100 miles per hour one night before Christmas. At least, that was the speed estimate after the fact, when traffic investigators began to crawl around the three steaming pieces of the bright-red Isuzu Rodeo that had come to rest inside Wagner’s, a few feet short of the pool table. The top speed could have been 90 or 95, but 100 made for a nice round number, and the television reporters always used the biggest numbers they could get away with, whether it was speed or snowfall.