Laura Lippman - Every Secret Thing

“No one’s ever done anything to me. I mean, not like that.”

“Really?” For a moment, she thought Lenhardt knew she was lying. He was a good homicide police and being a good police meant knowing how to listen to everything, how to keep secrets and retain them for years, in the hopes they might be useful some day.

No, she told herself, trying to remember to chew her food with the careful “savoring” bites recommended by her e-Diet program, she was giving her sergeant too much credit. He didn’t know everything. The knowledge felt blasphemous, but good. It was not unlike the way she felt when she realized the priest at her cousin’s wedding was drunk, or that Father Mike couldn’t know if you didn’t tell him absolutely everything at confession. Even her computer wouldn’t know if she was lying, at day’s end, when she dutifully logged her meals. There was only one God and only He-she couldn’t help herself, she still thought of him as He in raised gilt letters-only He really knew what He wanted. Everybody else was just making it up as they went along.

It was at the Catonsville branch of the Baltimore County Public Library that someone finally thought to call the police. The always busy branch was particularly antic on the third Friday in June, with children selling band candy and a community group gathering signatures on a petition for plantings along the Frederick Road median strip. Inside, the talk-loud, insistent talk, not at all library-like-was about the Fourth of July celebration, and whether there would be fireworks, given last year’s unfortunate incident. (A small fire, no injuries, but still it raised the question of whether the local Elks Lodge should be entrusted with this task again.)

Miriam Rosen, a patron at Catonsville for more than thirty years, always felt a surge of nostalgia for its more formal past. The reconfigured branch was so crowded, so overwhelmed by all the services that libraries were now expected to provide-not just books and periodicals, but compact discs and videos and DVDs and computers with Internet access-that it seemed more flea market than library. No wonder Starbucks had become so popular, Miriam thought. In Starbucks, a person could find a place to sit.

She parked Sascha, Jake, and Adrien in the children’s section, reminding Sascha to keep an eye on the baby, as Adrien was still known at age three. Twelve-year-old Sascha rolled her eyes, irritated, but that was as far as her adolescent moodiness had progressed. Miriam’s friends envied her this polite, solemn daughter, but Miriam considered Sascha almost too passive. She wanted her children to be fighters, quick to challenge authority, even hers.

Now, Jake was a toss-up-at age eight, he was a cipher, polite but secretive, with a con man’s charm, and Miriam sensed that his underwear drawer would yield all manner of contraband as he got older. Then there was Adrien, her late-in-life blessing, her favorite mistake, the Disney World souvenir, just like in the commercial. “You went to Disney World with an eight-year-old and a four-year-old, and still found a way to have sex?” her friends had marveled. Really, Adrien was a bit of a boast all the way around. Everyone in the Rosen family doted on Adrien, yet she was impossible to spoil. She soaked up love the way a napping cat absorbed sunshine. Look at her, sitting Indian-style at Sascha’s feet, paging through a picture book, absolutely contented. She was obedient without being a goody-goody, sweet but not saccharine.

“Sascha?”

“What?” The teenager gave the word two syllables, almost three.

“Keep an eye on Adrien,” Miriam repeated. She headed to the CD section to see what operas were available. The Baltimore Public Library was a bit populist for Miriam’s taste, skewing its collections to what people really wanted, as opposed to what they should want, so the classical music selection was thin. But Miriam never complained, perhaps because she felt a bit guilty about checking out CDs so she could download them onto her computer at home and, with Jake’s help, burn her own CDs. It wasn’t wrong, exactly, but it also wasn’t right-one of those middle-class everyone-does-it crimes, like speeding or rounding down on income taxes.

Miriam had been pregnant with Adrien when she began playing opera CDs on her endless bouts of chauffeuring the older two, hoping appreciation would come with repeated exposure. When she first left her job at the Homeless Persons Representation Project, she had tried listening to Italian language tapes, but her thoughts ended up drifting. She decided music might require less concentration, permitting her to check in and out. Like a baby in a womb, stereo speakers blasting Mozart at mother’s convex belly, she drove around in her Volvo, willing the music and foreign words to wash over her.

But so far, the only thing she had learned was how many little bits of opera had entered everyday life, like common foreign phrases so familiar they were no longer regarded as foreign. Miriam recognized melodies from Carmen because they had been incorporated into an episode of Gilligan’s Island, and she could hum Pagliacci’s lament only because it had been used to tout the wonders of Rice Krispies when she was a child. No, it was Adrien who sang along to Madame Butterfly, whose face brightened when a car commercial included that famous strand of notes from Lakmé .

Oh, to have the spongelike mind of a child again, to soak up knowledge as easily as you popped a Flintstone vitamin. Jake was at that stage where he wanted to know everything, everything, and he used his knowledge with an almost unattractive aggression, correcting Miriam until she got a bit sharp with him. Sascha was beginning to seek forbidden information in secret. Sascha being Sascha, this meant a copy of God’s Little Acre under her bed. Really, the girl was almost quaint in her attempts to rebel.

Blessed Adrien remained incurious about the world, content that it would reveal its mysteries to her soon enough. Which was fine with Miriam. Childlike wonder was a bit wearying the third time around.

Her CDs chosen- La Traviata and Manon Lescaut -Miriam checked out the new acquisitions, best-sellers all, and a table of for-sale items, last year’s best-sellers. Back in the children’s section, Sascha was lost in The Red Fairy Tales, the world forgotten as she leaned against the shelf, a piece of hair drawn between her lips. It was a lovely tableau, even with the hair-chewing bit. An incomprehensible teenage habit, yet Miriam had done it, too. Tasted her hair, split the split ends, plucked out one strand at a time, just because she could, because it was her hair to do with as she wished, and because this drove her mother crazy. For a moment, Miriam saw Sascha as a perceptive stranger might, a girl poised between childhood and adolescence. You rushed so hard to grow up, Miriam remembered- until you realized you had no choice . Then you wanted to slow down, draw childhood out, go back to simpler stories and simpler games.

It took her a second to register the fact that Adrien was nowhere to be seen.

“Sascha,” she said, feeling a mild irritation at the girl’s thoughtlessness, “where’s your sister?”

Sascha looked up, needing a moment to surface from her imaginary world. “Adrien? She’s right here. I mean, she was right here. Maybe she went off with Jake.”

Perhaps because it was a library, and perhaps because Miriam, too, loved fairy tales, it still didn’t occur to her to feel anything more than impatient.

But when she found Jake alone at one of the library’s computers-trying to hack his way past the filters, just to see if it could be done-a slight panic began a skipping beat somewhere between Miriam’s stomach and heart. Where had the baby gone? The three Rosens split up, looking everywhere. Adrien was not in the children’s section, or in the rest rooms, or curled up in an aisle’s cozy dead end. Miriam’s hands began to shake, and she had to exert enormous control not to yell at someone, anyone. Sascha and Jake, for their carelessness. The library staff, for running such a chaotic bazaar instead of a hushed, serious place for study. The other families, for daring to be whole.