Laura Lippman - Every Secret Thing

Cynthia made a pot of coffee, transferred it to a carafe that sat on a ceramic trivet. Italy , she thought. Our honeymoon . Whenever she thought about Tanika-stretched out on Cynthia’s bed, chatting to her boyfriend, shoes leaving black marks on the spread-she always ended up in Italy, on her honeymoon.

Why are you going to Italy, people-well, her parents’ friends-had asked the young couple. Why not Hawaii? Why not Jamaica? Go someplace you won’t work so hard. Why Italy?

“For the shoes,” Cynthia drawled.

People had laughed as she knew they would. “Oh, but you’ll want to see Rome, of course, and Venice, and Tuscany if you have time,” they advised. Cynthia had put a cautionary hand on the arm of such well-intentioned travel guides, and repeated slowly, as if they were hard of hearing, and some of them were: “Yes, that’s all very nice. But I’m going for the shoes.”

No one had believed her, of course. That was one of the advantages of exaggerating one’s own persona. No one ever quite believed that Cynthia was as vain or self-centered as she insisted she was. Perhaps she wasn’t. They may have gone for the shoes, as she later told her friends, but they ended up doing the whole damn boot, from toe to top. They had done it on an unofficial one-for-Warren, two-for-Cynthia basis. This was the model on which their marriage would be based, and it had worked pretty well, up until that day when nothing worked anymore, except inertia and this shared grief, a grief so profound that it would defeat anyone who tried to carry it alone.

In Italy, Cynthia had been surprised to learn that Warren was a dutiful, earnest tourist. It was the first unexpected bit of knowledge in her marriage, and while not unwelcome, it made her wonder just how observant she was. She had seen herself as a conqueror, winning an impossible prize over a large field, yet Warren-the-tourist-guidebook in hand-had ventured dangerously close to geeky. In hindsight, Cynthia realized she should have known that a man as successful and handsome as Warren should have had a little more dog in him. But the face, the shoulders, turned out to be fairly late developments in the life of a bookish little nerd. Growing up in Pittsburgh, Warren had been a grade-grubber whose asthma kept him out of sports, while his strong-willed single mother kept him off the streets lest he be tempted into more unsuitable extracurriculars. Egypt had caught his fancy and led him to a more general appreciation of archaeology. His idea for their honeymoon, broached with the tentativeness of a man already used to his ideas being rejected out of hand, was a dig in Central America, where you paid money for the privilege of sifting through dirt in some maybe-temple. Cynthia had gotten a lot of mileage out of that story.

Still, she would never have denied him his day in Pompeii. She didn’t accompany him-she had stayed in the hotel, writing thank-you notes to her mother’s friends, who would be quick to let Judge and Mrs. Poole know if Cynthia was tardy on this task-but she had paged through the books he brought back. And wished she hadn’t. There was one image she could never shake, an image that came back to her unbidden, time and again. She had seen it when her cell phone rang on July 17, seven years ago. And she saw it last night, about 10:02 P.M., when Brittany Little’s image flashed on her television screen.

It was odd that she had seen the news at all, for Cynthia’s family treated Cynthia like the Sleeping Beauty, trying to shield her from certain things. Only instead of spindles, it was missing children that Cynthia was not allowed to contemplate. For seven years, newspapers had been hidden and television shows muted, lest Cynthia hear about another missing or dead child.

The thing that no one understood was that she didn’t care about any child but her own, and never would.

Finally, 11 A.M., her self-imposed deadline, arrived. She dialed the number the sergeant had given her, and asked to speak to Nancy Porter. She thought she heard a catch in the girl’s voice when she revealed her name, an invitation to speak of their shared history. But she hurried by it, into the present. Nancy Porter was nothing to her. For reasons Cynthia could never quite fathom, she felt shamed in front of the girl, as if the detective had something on her.

“As you may recall, my own daughter was taken almost seven years ago,” she told the detective.

“I remember the case,” the detective said, but she didn’t volunteer anything more.

“Yes. And as you probably recall, she was missing for several days before she was…found.” Cynthia paused, wondering if she needed to add a word to that sentence. Dead. My baby was found dead. To this day, she hated to say it so plainly. It wasn’t the starkness of the word that bothered Cynthia, it was its simplicity. Dead did not begin to encompass what had happened to her child. Dead ended.

“I know,” the detective all but whispered.

“They’re home, you know. Within the past few weeks. They’re home, back in Southwest Baltimore, not even three miles from where this happened.”

“Do you have any specific information that links them to this case?”

“They’re home. What more do you need to know?”

“Well, but-in some ways, the two…disappearances are very different. Your daughter was an infant, this girl is a toddler. Your child was taken on impulse, this seems to be part of a more calculated plan, with clothes being swapped-”

“You want information? You want similarities? Well, here it is. The little girl who was taken-” She groped for the name, which had not registered.

“ Brittany Little.”

“Yes. Brittany Little. Well, Brittany Little has long curly hair and café-au-lait skin. Brittany Little is, in fact, a dead-ringer for my three-year-old, who’s sitting upstairs right now. But I can’t help wondering if that might be different, if these girls weren’t so inept.”

“You have another daughter?” The detective’s voice was surprised, almost awed.

“Yes. And I’d like this one to live. I’d like Brittany Little to live, too.” The sentiment was a split-second late. Of course she wanted the child to be found unharmed. She wouldn’t volunteer anyone for what had happened to her.

But what Cynthia really wanted was for Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller to be held accountable at last.

“Do the girls know about your new child? Have they threatened your family in any way, or made any attempts to contact you?”

“This is not a time for questions.” Cynthia had lost all patience and was, for a moment, the woman she used to be-a boss, a supervisor, a political operative, a person who gave orders and saw them carried out. “Don’t sit there blabbing to me. Who knows why they do what they do, then or now. Who cares anything about their motives ? They waited, last time. Remember? They waited four days. If you arrest them now, maybe they won’t do what they did last time. Maybe they won’t kill another child.”

“Mrs. Barnes-”

“You will talk to them.” It was at once a question and a command.

“I’m not at liberty to discuss our investigation.”

Cynthia did not allow any tentativeness to seep into her voice this time. “You will talk to them.”

“Yes.” The detective’s voice was almost a whisper. “God, yes. Of course we’ll talk to them.”

Cynthia Barnes hung up the phone and poured herself another cup of coffee. The trivet took her to Italy, Italy took her to Pompeii, and Pompeii always brought her back to the place where the world ended, which happened to be on Oliver Street in East Baltimore, on July 17, seven years ago.

She had been on a corner in East Baltimore because the mayor, who loved to dress up, had put on a garbageman’s uniform and gone out with a trash crew to one of those neighborhoods that was always bellyaching about how neglected it was by the mayor’s administration. Normally, Cynthia wouldn’t have been there at all, but there was an out-of-town reporter following the mayor, and she wanted to keep an eye on things.