Laura Lippman - Every Secret Thing

But it was the mannish quality that made Gloria Kolchak Potrcurzski cry. Gloria had been the only girl in a family of six, and the world she created for her one daughter had been reactionary in its femininity-pink-and-white room, canopy bed, shelves of dolls, unlimited funds for clothes and hair care. And she was on the verge of success when twenty-year-old Nancy decided she was sick of fighting her own destiny. She changed her major to criminal justice and, nearly two years later, stood before her mother as a freshly minted cadet.

“I never thought my daughter would grow up to be a cop,” said the woman who was a daughter to one cop and a sister to two others.

“Don’t worry, Mom,” Nancy had said. “I’ll make detective quick enough, and then I’ll wear skirts every day.”

She was the kind of daughter who kept such promises. So seven years later, as Saturday eased into Sunday and the fourth of July gave way to the fifth, Nancy was wearing a tailored white blouse, a knee-length khaki skirt, hose, and Easy Spirit pumps. The shoes were more comfortable than regular pumps, but she wouldn’t want to play basketball in them, as women had in the old television ads.

Nor did she want to walk along an overgrown path and splash across a polluted stream in a darkness brightened only by the beam of a small flashlight, but that was what she had decided to do.

It was a hot, yeasty night, the kind that made old-timers downtown sniff the breeze and wonder if McCormick Spice Co. had suddenly rematerialized in the harbor. But the smell was all over the metro area, and it was more grain than spice. For Nancy, the hot, scent-laden wind stirred up memories of her Grandmother Potrcurzski’s kitchen-homemade rolls rising in a covered bowl, pierogi shells awaiting their fillings, a sweet undercurrent of cabbage. Cabbage could smell sweet if a cook treated it gently. Nancy drove into the past with her windows down, indifferent to the heat, wondering if she could find the right spot after all these years.

Olivia Barnes had been missing for four days going on five before the cadets were sent to this asphalt parking lot on the southwestern corner of Leakin Park. A homeless man had been found pushing Olivia’s carriage, using it instead of the usual shopping cart for the odd collection of things he considered valuable. Inevitably, the deranged man was treated as a suspect, but he was adamant in his insistence that he had found the carriage in the creek bed, a narrow stream shrunken by that summer’s drought. So a yellow school bus brought the academy students to the southwestern edge of the park. Nancy was among those cadets.

Of course, few classes went through the academy without searching Leakin Park at least once, as a training tool, and such searches usually began with the joking admonition not to grab just any old body, or they’d be there all day. But no one had cracked any jokes on the morning they gathered to look for Olivia Barnes. The only sounds in Leakin Park that day were the slow, measured footsteps of the cadets walking deeper and deeper into the park, trying to keep an even ten feet between them.

Outdoor searches are doomed to imperfection. Nancy knew that even before she went into the academy. People were always stunned when a body turned up in an area the police had already combed, but these second-guessers had never tried to search a forest step-by-step. On a July day, the deep shade of Leakin Park played tricks on the eyes, almost like a jigsaw puzzle, until everything was green, dark green, and gray. It was all too easy to imagine a child’s body hidden in a patch of vines that happened to fall in the space between the cadets’ dragging feet.

Nancy was partnered with a classmate, Cyrus Hickory, a cocky twenty-three-year-old who couldn’t get over the fact that he had a college degree. Cyrus was a study in contrasts, an African-American man with a shaved head and an accent that Nancy would describe as 100 percent redneck because her ear wasn’t trained to catch the watered-down imitation of Tidewater that Cyrus was trying out that summer: “When ah was getting my duh -gree at Commonwealth…” Nancy reminded him, after every third reference or so to his days at Virginia Commonwealth, that most of the cadets had college degrees now. But Cyrus countered: “I majored in criminology, with a minor in sociology. I chose this career for myself back when I was in sixth grade.”

Nancy had assumed he was insulting her, in a roundabout way. With two uncles and a fiancé in the department, she had a triple taint of nepotism. It turned out that Cyrus, from Virginia, didn’t know any of this, not on that faraway July day. As a result, he was one of the few people who dared to patronize her, which was oddly refreshing. At least she didn’t have to worry if he was playing up to her, the way some others seemed to do.

When they broke for lunch, eating sandwiches and drinking bottled water provided by a group of volunteers with ties to the missing child’s family, she told Cyrus that she thought the grid was off-kilter, sending them in the wrong direction.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he scoffed. “The carriage was found in the creek bed. So you gotta figure the kidnapper realized he couldn’t push it up the hill, and he dumped it there, then continued up and over the ridge.”

“I think he might have been walking along the stream, not trying to cross it, when he decided to get rid of the carriage. What if he was walking in the stream?”

“Why would someone do that?”

“Leaves less of a trail, right? No footprints in the dust, no smashed-down undergrowth. It’s the kind of stuff they teach you about Indians when you’re in the fifth grade.”

This information was, in fact, part of the social studies unit on Native Americans taught at St. William of York that year, as it had been in every parish school, even in Nancy ’s day. But she wasn’t thinking about fifth-graders, not then. They were looking for a grown-up, a sociopath capable of carrying a twenty-pound child with ease. It had not occurred to anyone that two little girls had passed the baby back and forth after abandoning the balky baby carriage at the water’s edge, or that they walked through the creek bed because their ankles were bare and they knew these woods were full of poison ivy and sumac. Helen Manning had made sure Alice and Ronnie could recognize the leaves the summer before last, after both girls came down with horrible rashes from playing here.

“There used to be a shack, a ways down Franklintown,” Nancy said. “My mother has a distant cousin on this side of town, who works at a crab house-” Her tongue flirted with the idea of invoking the name, Kolchak, and seeing if Cyrus recognized it. But she decided against it. She might win Cyrus’s deference, but she would lose his respect. “Anyway, we took this shortcut, through the park, so I remember the shack. A little man lived there, with chickens and roosters. We called him the Chicken Man. He was like some…vision out of the past. You couldn’t figure out how he was allowed to live this way, in a tarpaper shack with an outhouse.”

“It’s not part of the grid,” Cyrus said.

“We’re on our lunch break. They can’t fault us for going off on our own if we’re back in time.”

“Chain of command,” he said. “You got to respect chain of command, Nancy. We’re not even police yet. You go doing what you want to do, and you’ll never be a police.”

“I respect chain of command as much as anyone. On their time, I’ll do what they tell me to do. But this is my time, right? You don’t have to come with me.”

But he did. So they had begun to walk, alongside the creek and not in it, toward the shack that Nancy remembered. It was farther away than she had calculated, and she soon realized they had gone so far that they could never get back in time.