Laura Lippman - Every Secret Thing

“Great,” Cyrus said, glancing at his watch, “now we’re in deep shit.”

“I think it’s just around the next bend.”

But it wasn’t. Not around the next bend, or the one after that, or even the one after that. They must have walked at least a mile before Nancy saw the place she remembered, across the creek and up a little hill. It was no longer visible from the roadway, as it had been when she was a child. The forest had taken care of that, creating a screen of trees and vines. Only someone who already knew it was there could find it.

Funny, she hung back at the sight of the shack, spooked by the accuracy of her memory. It was Cyrus who splashed across the creek, heedless of what the water would do to his shoes and trousers, running up the hill, eager to be done with this. A trick of sound brought them the whistle call of their sergeant. They would never make it back in time, no matter how quickly they moved. There would be hell to pay, double hell for Nancy, whose insubordination would be assumed to be evidence of a smugness born of her family connections. Nancy crossed the creek by jumping from mossy rock to mossy rock, almost losing her footing on the last leap.

In the doorway of the shack, Cyrus let out a noise that started as a cry of exultation, then quickly faded into something more strangled and somber. His shoulders sagged as he leaned against the shack, and the structure seemed to vibrate from his weight, rippling like water.

“Stay there,” he called out in a choked voice, but Nancy didn’t see how she could. She climbed the hill to confront the consequences of her hunch.

The interior of the shack was shockingly cool for such a hot day. How could this little house of sticks, flimsier than anything the three pigs ever built, provide so much protection from the heat? Nancy felt herself shivering as her eyes adjusted, trying to prepare herself to see what she would never be ready to see.

A pile of used diapers was stacked in the corner, the smell almost comforting in its normalcy, although a quick glance revealed that the baby’s waste had a sickly green-yellow cast. Plastic cups and spoons-ice cream or yogurt, maybe pudding cups-had been left in another corner and there was a whitish smear next to Olivia Barnes’s mouth, as if someone had tried to feed her at some point.

Why feed a baby if you’re going to kill her? Nancy thought.

“I don’t know,” Cyrus said, yet she had not spoken aloud, she was sure she had not. “I just don’t know.”

The baby’s eyes were open, her arms stiff at her sides, as if she had died waiting for someone to hold her one more time. Next to her was an old-fashioned jack-in-the-box, rusted at the corners. It bothered Nancy, that toy. There was something almost obscene about it, with its faded but still garish colors.

She reached into her pocket and put on the gloves they had been given that morning on the bus, like kids on a field trip getting their tickets to the museum or planetarium. The cadets had been instructed not to touch anything if possible, but Nancy chose to ignore this directive, too. She was afraid she might cry if she didn’t find something constructive to do. She reached for the box, and although she did not touch the lever on the side, it popped open instantly, as if primed for this moment. She and Cyrus both jumped at its squeak, then laughed weakly at themselves.

The monkey that emerged had a red and yellow costume of cheap sateen, and its plastic face had long ago lost the paint that defined its simian features.

“It’s the weasel that’s supposed to pop,” Nancy said.

“What?” said Cyrus.

“Pop goes the weasel . Not the monkey.” She closed the lid, turned the little crank, and, sure enough, that was the song it played.

“I guess no one knows what a weasel looks like,” Cyrus said.

The fact that this conversation was inane was not lost on either of them. But they were young, and inexperienced. The cynicism that might steer them through such a moment was years away, bodies away, maybe even a lifetime away. Possibly there wasn’t a cop in all of Baltimore who was hard enough to save this moment with a smart-ass comment.

Nancy turned the box around and then over. It was then that she saw the piece of masking tape inscribed with the proud, round shapes of a child who has just learned to write in cursive: Alice Manning. The name had no meaning to her then, but she could imagine a teacher telling Alice Manning, as teachers had once told Nancy, that her A should look like a sailboat going backward, that her M should be tall and strong, like an iron fence. A teacher would be proud of the girl who wrote these letters.

Nancy closed the lid, so the toy would be as she found it, and backed out of the house. Cyrus was already running upstream, splashing through the brackish water. He wanted to get there first, she assumed, to hog the credit for her hunch. But she misjudged him, it turned out. He just wanted to get away, to put as much distance as he could between himself and the dead child.

Nancy was thinking about Cyrus as she made her way along that same stream in the dark, her flashlight picking out a path. Again, the trip was longer than she remembered. Again, she rounded bend after bend, expecting to see the house, only to find it wasn’t there. What if it was gone? How stupid would she feel, how silly?

The last time she had seen Cyrus was two years ago in Circuit City, when she and Andy were shopping for a new television set. He called himself a sales associate and he said the money was great, better than he had ever imagined. He was good at sales, much to his surprise. “Still a cop?” he asked Nancy. “Yeah,” Nancy said, “but out in the county.” He nodded, and Nancy detected a world of assumptions in that nod. Everyone thought they knew why she left the city. Everyone was wrong. And even if she told them, they wouldn’t believe her. She wouldn’t believe it either. Who would ever guess that good luck could be the worst thing that ever happened to a person? Mistakes- everyone made mistakes, and therefore could forgive them. Nancy had been derailed by her own freaky luck.

The shack had slumped over time, sagging as surely as Cyrus’s shoulders had. Nancy hesitated at the foot of the hill, just as she had once before. Perhaps her young self had understood, in its dim subconscious way, the consequences of walking up the hill, of finding what she found. Would there be newer, harsher consequences if she walked up to that threshold again? But she had come all this way in the dark. She had to look.

Her flashlight found Ronnie Fuller in a corner of the cabin, knees drawn to her chest, rocking rhythmically. She squinted when the beam from Nancy ’s flashlight washed over her face, but said nothing. Nancy flicked the light around. No one else was there, alive or dead. There was nothing there at all. Just Ronnie, rocking back and forth, humming a little tune to herself.

“She in there?” Infante asked when he returned to the tenth floor about 2 A.M., summoned by Nancy ’s page.

“Yeah,” she said, drinking a cup of coffee she had just brewed, although she didn’t really need the caffeine. Adrenaline was more than doing its job, keeping her alert and sharp, impervious to sleep.

“You talk to her?”

“We chatted, about nothing in particular. But once I got her in there and went down to the machines to get her a soda and a candy bar, she fell asleep.”

“And you let her?”

Nancy knew Infante didn’t mean his question to land like a rebuke, but it did.

“It’s weird, I couldn’t wake her for anything,” she said, trying not to sound defensive. “I shook her arm, I all but yelled in her ear, but she kept sleeping all along.”