Laura Lippman - Every Secret Thing

“Except-you don’t think your client did kill.” Daniel Kutchner had leaned against the headboard, but his left leg dangled over the side of the bed, still in contact with the floor, like an actor trying to make love according to the old Hays Code. He wasn’t the type to stay overnight, which was fine with Sharon, the best of all possible worlds. As long as they didn’t rush into the night or escape into sleep immediately after sex, she didn’t care what they did.

“No, she didn’t.”

“Then why would you let her serve seven years? Why didn’t she draw less time than the other girl?”

“The evidence was…somewhat contradictory. And the girls’ statements were diametrically opposed. She said-she said. The judge who presided couldn’t see any fair way to sort it out.”

“Sounds like your client got screwed.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

The band had tried to quit at 1 A.M., but Andy-tie undone, jacket shorn-had seized the microphone and demanded that the wedding guests open their wallets and pay for another set. Nancy, filled with liquid goodwill, beamed at her husband. This was the man she had fallen in love with, boisterous and confident. The feds did not encourage such personalities, and he had to keep himself so tamped down at work that his broad shoulders had rounded a little and his head seemed to hang at times, heavy on his neck. She hoped the law, once he finished school and entered a practice, would restore some of Andy’s self back to him.

Now, dropped to one knee on the dance floor, bills clenched in his fist, he was every bit the boy she had known since junior high and loved since high school. “More,” he bellowed. “More, more, more. We will have music. And the bar will stay open. A Polish wedding can’t end this early. It would be shameful.”

Eventually the reception ended, and neither Nancy nor Andy was really in any shape to drive. But neither was anyone else, so they ambled to the Double-T Diner out on Route 40, albeit on the opposite end from New York Fried Chicken. There, her latest diet long forgotten, Nancy dragged french fries through gravy with her left hand and held on to Andy with her right. With his free hand, he flipped through the tabletop jukebox, but it was a bit of a gyp, for the restaurant’s sound system was dominated by whoever had the fastest quarter. A Bon Jovi song bounced through the night, and she couldn’t tell if it was one of their old ones or one of their new ones that sounded like one of their old ones. She could have been eighteen again, it could have been the night of her senior prom. Her brides-maid’s dress, a yellow horror, would have fit right in at the Kenwood High School prom.

Nancy was one of the few people she knew who admitted to being happy in high school. Why was that such a badge of shame for others? She didn’t see it as some Glory Days high point, but it had been fun, and she had been conscious of the fact that life wouldn’t always be fun, or easy. And it was for this very reason that she had gloried in eighteen, hadn’t wasted a minute of it. True, she had worried about her weight even then, but what she wouldn’t give to have back her teenage body. Even the low points-the brief breakups with Andy, the science classes that had almost sunk her completely-had made her appreciate the effortless fun, day in and day out.

Andy was trying to put a french fry in his coffee.

“I am so driving home,” she told him, not minding that he was wasted. He worked hard; he had earned this.

“Let’s”-it came out a little slurred, but nowhere near as bad as it might have been-“let’s drive up to Gunpowder Falls.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now. Why not now? Like we used to.”

“Like we-” Then she got it.

Within forty-five minutes, she was on top of him in the bucket seat of his Jeep Cherokee, part of her mind grateful for the room these SUVs provided, another part thinking how funny it would be if some county patrol cop came tap, tap, tapping at their window with his flashlight, then saw Nancy astride Andy, the yellow horror pushed above her hips and below her breasts, revealing the wretched strapless bra that had been digging into her all night. Andy couldn’t have gotten that off with a knife, the shape he was in.

“Evening, Officer,” she imagined herself saying, holding up her badge to the window. “I’m Homicide Detective Porter and this is Federal Agent Porter, from the local ATF field office.”

But they were left alone, so Nancy settled for the efficient, shuddering pleasures her husband provided. At the last minute, he asked if she wanted him to pull out, as he hadn’t brought anything with him, but she just held him hard inside her, shaking her head. Later, she wondered why she hadn’t minded taking the chance. Certainly it wasn’t because she was worried about the dress.

Helen Manning saw the sun come up that Sunday. More accurately, she saw the light seeping into her kitchen, which faced east, while she sat in her still-dark living room. Her glass was long empty, had been for hours. She had allowed herself exactly three cigarettes, and these were long gone, too. The cigarettes had been the tobacco variety because dope was something she had only when the right man was in her life, and there were fewer and fewer men these days. Strange, but she had dated even more infrequently after Alice went away, which seemed counterintuitive. After all, it should have been easier to meet men when she was unencumbered, but she found she had little taste for it. Helen preferred the admiration of men to their companionship. And that was easy to get, as long as a woman kept herself up. Helen could go weeks on the warmth of a single glance in the supermarket. She still turned heads.

Finally she heard the sounds she had waited all night to hear-a car door slamming, footsteps on the walk, the storm door opening, the key in the unlocked lock, turning one way, then the other.

“Good morning,” she said to Alice.

“You don’t need to wait up for me.”

“It’s six A.M.”

“Really, you shouldn’t worry.” Alice ’s voice, which had been husky even as a child, was a pleasant contralto, all warm concern.

“You’ve been out all night. Where did you go? Who were you with?”

“Nowhere. No one. I’m sorry, I just can’t sleep these days. So I walk.”

“It’s dangerous.” Her voice scaled up, unintentionally tentative, making the maternal assertion sound like a question.

“Not where I go.”

“Which is-”

“You know, you should go to sleep, Mom. You’re useless if you don’t get your eight hours.”

It was just what Helen said about herself, all the time. I’m useless if I don’t get my eight hours . Alice had repeated it back in her usual pleasant voice, with no judgment attached. Yet Helen felt judged all the same. With or without eight hours of sleep, she was useless to her daughter now and would be until she gave her what she wanted, until she told her what she wanted to hear.

If only she could.

Brittany Little disappeared late in the afternoon on the first day of the holiday weekend, wandering away from her mother and her mother’s boyfriend while they shopped for a sofa in Value City.

“One minute she was there,” her mother, Maveen Little, kept telling police, “and then she wasn’t.” No one seemed to believe the minute part, Maveen could tell. Who could lose a child in a minute? But she was adamant: She and her boyfriend, Devlin Hatch, could not have turned their backs for more than a minute as they studied the love seats and sleepers and couches. A minute was a long, long time. “Count it out for yourself,” she snapped at the young officer, who was acting sympathetic. But if they believed her, why wasn’t she talking to a detective yet? Why were these officers baby-sitting her and Devlin in their own apartment, instead of searching the city for her baby?