Laura Lippman - Every Secret Thing

Now he lunged at Nancy, grabbing a handful of her ass.

“Nice,” he said, “for a white girl.”

Lenhardt had punched him so hard in the stomach that the kid had doubled over and fallen to his knees. The sergeant smiled at Nancy over the boy’s prostrate body, happy for the opportunity, inviting her to land a kick or a punch if she wanted. When she passed, he gave her a curious look, then helped himself, distributing the punishment he thought fair. The kid had to lie there and take it.

He had touched a cop. Nancy couldn’t help feeling that she had failed, that a better cop wouldn’t have been grabbed in the first place. And Lenhardt had let her mistake slide because he was so happy for a chance to smack that kid before the day was over.

“The wood-chipper-” Nancy began again, and she knew she was going to off-load to Infante the anger she had caught from the kid. Life was just a long game of emotional tag, one bad mood passing from person to person. But before she could finish, her Nokia chirped and the text message scrolled by in plain view.

I’M HOME

The words seemed to shiver on the screen, but that was probably just some disturbance in the cell. The Kenwood Homecoming Queen again. Why didn’t she just get her own public access channel on Baltimore County cable, keep her friends up-to-date with a 24/7 crawl.

“Your hubby?” Infante asked.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “He’s pissed at me. Besides, I already know where he is.”

The message stared insistently back at her. Was it for her? No way. She wouldn’t even try to make a connection if it weren’t for Lenhardt, the sheer coincidence of tonight’s conversation: If he was a city mutt, I’d know to check Leakin Park .

Leakin Park. Even a near homonym, such as Lincoln or leaking, could make her jump. Leakin Park. The name always brought back the little lean-to in the woods, or the silhouette of her classmate from the academy, Cyrus Hickory, standing in the door. He told her to stay back, but Nancy had to prove she could do whatever he did, so she crossed the stream, walked up to the falling-down house-

No . Over the past seven years, Nancy had learned she could choose, that she had the power not to cross the threshold if she wasn’t up to seeing what was on the other side. So tonight, she did what she didn’t do then. She backed away, so she was moving away from the little house in the woods, splashing backward through the polluted stream, edging up the hill, her gloved hands empty, blessedly empty.

Lenhardt came back to the table, threw his money down, and waved off the bills that Nancy and Infante tried to add. “I’m one drink away from a divorce,” he said. “Marcia is more lenient than.08, but not by much. You should go home, too, Nancy.”

“What about me?” Infante asked.

“Not even Dr. Joyce Brothers herself could save your relationships, Kevin.”

“True enough,” the detective said amiably, more amused than anyone at the string of Mrs. Infantes that had come and gone in the last twenty years. He got up and headed to the bar. The barmaid had a trace of a limp, but she was still redheaded and still pretty, in that hard, shellacked-hair way of a county barmaid.

Out of nowhere, Lenhardt asked: “You ever think about a baby?”

“Baby?” He knows, she thought. All this time, he’s known and he’s never asked . Of course he would know. Cops gossip like Polish grandmothers. You know the background on Porter, right? The Kolchaks’ niece? A shame, but she brought it on herself. You’d think she’da known better, with her background .

“Having a baby. You think about it?”

“Oh.” She was so relieved that she didn’t mind Lenhardt getting personal with her. “Doesn’t everybody? But Andy has one semester of law school left, and I just made Homicide.”

“Babies are more important than any of that.”

“Yeah. How many kids you got?”

“Three,” Lenhardt said. “That I know of.” He popped his eyes and let his mouth gape, but he was too tired to pull off his own shtick.

“Be good,” he said abruptly and ambled off.

Be good? Where had that come from? But she took his advice, took it across the board. Drove straight home, woke up her sleeping husband, and made love to him, which he assumed was her way of apologizing, and maybe it was, although she didn’t think she had anything to apologize for. Life was so short, and she didn’t want to be at odds with the person who knew her best. The person who loved her before, the person who loved her after, the person who swore he would love her always.

Andy went back to sleep, but Nancy never did, not that night. She stared at the ceiling, adding seven to eleven, then subtracting it.

The call had to be a wrong number.

The first child disappeared from the Rite Aid at Ingleside Shopping Center. She was strapped into a cart on aisle 11-Baby Needs, Foot Care, Feminine Hygiene-when her mother, Mary Jo Herndon, remembered a new kind of hair gel she had seen advertised just that morning. The gel promised to get rid of the frizz while adding shine. She saw herself with straight, glossy hair, tossing it around as she laughed with some man. Maybe Bobby, maybe not. The actual man was less important than the shiny banner of hair, flying around the way it did in commercials, warm as sunlight on her shoulders.

Hair care was one aisle over, but there was a woman between Mary Jo and the end of the aisle, a big-butted woman who was studying the Dr. Scholl’s products with fierce concentration, her basket placed at an angle that made it impossible for another cart to get by. And Mary Jo didn’t want to ask her to move because there was something obstinate in that big behind, the sense of a woman spoiling for a fight. It was easier to leave the cart, step around the woman, and jog to the hair care aisle. After all, she was just going to grab the gel and then go to the cash register. The trip was already out of control. Mary Jo had come for toilet paper and charcoal, and now her cart was almost full.

Rite Aid didn’t carry the brand she remembered from the commercial, but it had a dizzying array of alternatives and Mary Jo paused to consider her options. There was a whole line of products in sleek lavender bottles, but the manufacturer called it a system, suggesting it was all-or-nothing. Part of her mind knew this was a gyp, a bluff. There was no way you had to buy the whole set to get the benefits of the gel.

But Mary Jo also believed an expensive purchase could be transforming. The product might not be any better, but choosing to pay extra was a way of saying you deserved a little luxury in this world and that mind-set could make it so. Didn’t she deserve the best, or at least something better? That’s what everyone said: You deserve better. Of course, her friends and family were talking about Bobby and her living situation, but there was no product on the earth that could fix Bobby. She grabbed a bottle of the lavender stuff and trotted back to aisle 11.

Aisle 11 was empty. No Jordan, no cart, no big-butted woman staring down at the Dr. Scholl’s products. Mary Jo must have gone the wrong way, turned right when she should have turned left. No problem. She retraced her steps, heading to aisle 9.

That was empty, too.

The first empty aisle had made her nervous, but it had been a safe, contained nervousness, for she assumed she had taken a wrong turn, that Jordan was waiting for her around the next corner. Mary Jo had felt the way she did on the long, cranking climb of the roller coaster at Adventure World-scared for the sake of it, yet secure, knowing the climb was just part of the suspense, that the fine print on the ticket was just for show.