Laura Lippman - Every Secret Thing

While she was baby-sitting the mayor, Tanika, a nineteen-year-old Coppin student, was baby-sitting Olivia. The girl had just started with the Barnes family a month before. Dutiful and dull, she had been hired for her seeming lack of interest in boys and clothes, and-more crucially-boys’ seeming lack of interest in her. Who could have known that she already had a boyfriend, a demigangster she was forbidden to see at home, who called her at the Barnes house every hour of the day? Who could guess that he would call just as she pushed Olivia’s carriage out on the front walk and that she would run back inside to take the call, thinking it would require no more than a minute of her time? And who could guess that Tanika, terrified of her reverend father’s knowing of her disobedience, would fritter away five, ten, fifteen, thirty, sixty, ninety precious minutes trying to find Olivia on her own? Ninety minutes were lost by the time she dared to call Cynthia on her cell. Ninety minutes gone, then four days gone, and finally, a lifetime.

But at the corner of Oliver and Montford, seven years ago, Cynthia knew none of this. She knew only that the baby-sitter was on the phone, trying to relay the impossible news that Olivia was missing. At that moment, Cynthia was still fighting, still struggling, still convinced she could do something-and that’s when she remembered the image from Warren’s guidebook, the one that had turned her stomach. It had been a photo of a dog, lashed to a post, preserved in the moment of his struggle. Twisted, writhing, he fought against the molten lava and the ash, determined not to die. For some reason, the dog seemed more conscious of his fate than all the humans of Pompeii combined. They stood still. The dog fought back.

“What’s wrong?” asked her summer intern, a bright young thing named Lisa Bell, who had styled herself after her boss until she was known as Cynthia-ette, or sometimes just Junior. “What’s wrong, Cynthia?”

It happened that the photographer who was traveling with the out-of-town reporter caught the mayor in the pose she wanted at the exact moment Cynthia snapped her cell phone shut. The photo captured the mayor in the foreground, grinning as he lifted a can onto the back of the truck. But if one squinted closely, there was Cynthia in the background, preserved in ash, another dog in Pompeii.

Now, on this July morning, she felt the first real stirrings of life she had known in ages. Not even Rosalind, turning somersaults on the sonogram, had made Cynthia feel this vital, this necessary. Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller weren’t through with her yet? Well, Cynthia Barnes was just getting started, too.

Helen Manning had just gotten up when the detectives arrived on her doorstep. She recognized they were detectives before they announced themselves and she pulled the sash tighter on her robe, although it was already quite tight. It was not her state of dress that made her feel shy and tentative before this dark man and fair, apple-cheeked girl. It was more as if they could see right through her, to the source of whatever mistakes she had made. Yet even as the silk-slippery sash cut into her narrow waist, she realized she was not at all surprised. It had taken years, but the second shoe had finally dropped.

“I’m Kevin Infante,” said the male detective, who had the kind of Mediterranean good looks to which Helen was once partial. She found herself patting her hair, running her fingertips across her neck as if she might be able to erase the beaded lines that had come to rest there, like those wispy necklaces favored by young girls. “And this is my partner, Nancy Porter.”

“We were hoping to talk to your-to Alice Manning,” the girl said. Although plump, she struck Helen as everything Alice had once yearned to be-unthreatening, agreeable, popular. Miss Congeniality. The class secretary but never the class president. Alice probably hadn’t broken the habit of wanting those things, poor thing.

“She’s not here. She’s…out.”

“Do you know where she is, or when she might be home?”

“May I ask what this is about?” Helen’s voice squeaked a little.

“We just want to talk to her,” the female detective repeated with a firm, unyielding tone. “Nothing more.”

“I think she took a walk.”

“A walk?”

“She walks a lot.” God, she must look like a terrible mother, standing here with her morning hair, in this decadent silk robe, like some madam in an old Storeyville brothel. All she needed to complete the picture was a bare-chested man at her kitchen table, reeking of sex and screaming for his breakfast. But Jesus, Alice was eighteen, a grown-up under the law. Was Helen to be held to a different standard because of the past? How many women could produce their eighteen-year-old children on a Saturday afternoon? It’s 1:30 P.M. , do you know where your children are? Helen had always thought the old public service announcement was more for children than for adults, for she had never felt safer than when she was curled up on the sofa in her family’s den, hearing that rhetorical question just before the nightly newscast. Her parents knew where she was. She knew where her parents were. All was right with the world.

“Does she have a cell phone? Or a job where we might find her?”

“You know, I’ve encouraged her to get a job.” Helen felt relief at being able to tell that small truth. “She says she’s looking. That’s probably what she’s doing today, following up on some leads.”

“Do you know where?”

“Well, no.” Helen tried to remember what they had discussed, specifically. “Not the grocery stores, because they’re union. And not the convenience stores. They’re not safe. I mean, don’t you agree? You wouldn’t want to have a daughter working in a convenience store, would you?”

She was flirting, she realized, setting up the male detective to tell her that, no, he didn’t have a daughter, wasn’t even married, in fact. Maybe he would scrawl his home number on his business card, or ask with fake nonchalance if there was a Mr. Manning.

But it was the girl who pulled out a card and handed it to Helen.

“Would you call us when she comes home? We just need to talk to her. Nothing formal. May have more to do with one of her friends than her.”

“ Alice has a friend?” Helen could not bear the idiocy of her own voice, this stupid, echoing, out-of-it quality, as if she were some Judy Holliday type. She never sounded this way, never. “I mean, she seems to keep to herself, as far as I know.”

“When did she get home?” the female detective asked.

Until that moment, Helen had been trying to cling to the idea that this was all a coincidence, that there was no link between present and past. Damn it, Alice, she thought, suddenly furious with her daughter. She had been given every chance to start over-second chances, third chances, even. But she would rather keep punishing Helen than take advantage of her opportunities.

“Last night,” the young woman prompted. “What time did she get home last night?”

“Do I have to talk to you?”

“No,” the male detective said. “But why wouldn’t you?”

“I can think,” Helen said, “of no shortage of reasons. For one thing-you still haven’t told me what this is about.”

“Well, it’s not really about anything. We’re working on a case, your daughter may be able to help us. That’s all.”

Ah, these were the police Helen remembered, in their most unhelpful guise. They were always so maddeningly elliptical, so noncommittal. Taciturn, reserved, insisting you were on a need-to-know basis even as they began destroying your life. Do you recognize this, Ms. Manning? Have you seen this before, Ms. Manning? The question had come before she could focus on the this in question. That detective had been middle-aged, thick-middled, and reeking of tobacco. She remembered still that she had not specifically requested “Ms.” and the presumption had irked her. She refused to look at the bagged object in their hands, eager to disavow it, even though she knew she could not.