Laura Lippman - Every Secret Thing

Cynthia could never be that casually cruel again. Yet her sorrow for this woman was generic at best, distant. Part of the problem was that Maveen Little was white. More troubling, she was poor, tacky poor. What did Cynthia Barnes have in common with this frizzy-haired woman who shopped at Value City?

Well, black men. But the fact that Maveen Little was the kind of white woman who dated black men only made her more repellent to Cynthia. The boyfriend looked normal enough, and the jailed father had clearly passed some good genes down to the baby. But how could either of them, how could any self-respecting black man think Maveen Little was a prize? Her very name screamed white trash, not to mention the blobby body, the acne-pitted face, the hideous hair. It would be one thing if the Michelle Pfeiffers of the world wanted to go out with brothers, Cynthia could almost abide that scenario, where the black man was so fine that a woman couldn’t help herself. But when you saw one of these pale, cheap-looking fat girls with a black man, the only explanation was that the man was looking for someone weak, someone who wouldn’t call him on his shit. That was the true insult to black women: not the status that white women conferred, but the fact that black men weren’t strong enough. What kind of coward would choose this woman?

And this was the thing about being a victim with a capital V that Cynthia could never make peace with. It was such a pathetic class, filled with losers whom she would never know, much less befriend. Cynthia did not wish her fate on anyone, not even the parents of the children who had destroyed her life. But that didn’t mean she had to embrace other victims, bond with them, pretend they were related.

She had tried, because everyone said she must. In the early years, she had attempted to join two kinds of groups-one for victims of violent crimes and one for parents who had lost their children. But the first group had been filled with ignorant, uneducated people whose very stupidity had played a role in their circumstances. And the second group-well, the second group hadn’t wanted her . Oh, no one had been so bold as to say that. The facilitator-apt title-had been ever so gentle when she came to Cynthia and suggested she would be happier in another group, that losing a child to a disease was profoundly different from losing a child to a violent act.

Tell me about it, Cynthia had thought. But she was too proud to go where she wasn’t wanted, too proud to be seen as the tacky one, bringing the whole group down. So she had stopped going. Stopped going to groups. Stopped going out. Stopped.

Funny, the one person with whom she had felt a real throb of empathy was that famous guitarist, the one whose son had fallen from a window. He was successful, able to provide his child with the best, yet he had been undone by something as simple as an open window. The rock star was vulnerable, she knew, to a certain unspoken criticism. One ran that risk when living an enviable life. People looked to see how your very good fortune had caused your downfall.

That had been her sin, that was why God had punished her. She was guilty of wanting to live an enviable life. It was one thing to be proud, or vain, but Cynthia had invited the world to look at her, to confirm her excellent opinion of herself. Toward that end, she had allowed the city magazine to run photographs of her home, to show her and Warren posed on their front porch, a power couple in the new city order. “Barnes Storming,” the headline had read. After all, he was the most successful black plaintiff ’s attorney in town, turning lead paint into gold. She was the woman who controlled access to the mayor, the voice in the ear, the gatekeeper.

She had not allowed the magazine to photograph Olivia. Give her that much. She had not paraded her motherhood. But she let it be known that she was one of those women who was juggling, that she had returned to her job at the mayor’s office after a mere three months off-and gotten her figure back in a remarkable six months. If she hadn’t, she would never have posed for that photograph. Because of the magazine’s long lead time, it had run two months later, a month before Olivia was killed. One of her more thoughtful correspondents had enclosed that photograph, scrawling “Pride goeth before a fall” across Cynthia’s trim waist, which was emphasized by the fitted coral suit she had chosen.

Cynthia, thanks to her family’s churchgoing habits, knew the letter writer had mangled the proverb: Pride goeth before destruction . It was a haughty spirit that led to a mere fall.

She turned off the television and went upstairs to dress. She wasn’t sure what one wore to pay a call on a grieving mother who was in denial of her grief, couldn’t remember what people had worn to call on her. Her outfit should be casual, but not too casual, brightly colored. Nothing black, nothing somber, nothing suggestive of funerals. If Cynthia Barnes could make one wish for Maveen Little’s sake, it would be to draw out this limbo. That was something that only she could understand, that the rest of the world got backward. As horrible as this uncertainty was, the days of knowledge would be more horrible still.

Although not much of a reader as a child, Mira Jenkins had never forgotten a children’s book in which a girl was given an unexpected gift of a dime. Or was it a quarter? An impossibly small sum of money, at any rate, worthless by today’s standards, but capable of purchasing a wealth of things at the dawn of the twentieth century. The girl in the book, dutiful and dull, considered various treats that she could share with her siblings-licorice whips, cookies, penny candy. Instead, she succumbed to temptation and purchased a strawberry ice cream cone, something that could never be shared among four children. The cone-surprise, surprise-proved unsatisfying, and the girl gave it away to another child. There was some moment of redemption, something to do with a kitten, and the girl vowed never again to forget the importance of sharing.

What a sap, Mira had thought at the time. The girl had earned the money. Her siblings didn’t have to know she had been given a quarter, much less that she bought ice cream. Hoarding was not wrong, as long as one was discreet. The cruel thing was to enjoy something in front of others, and Mira would never do that.

So she felt no qualms about keeping to herself the maybe-tip from the anonymous caller. If she did the work and it turned into something, she would have earned it. If it proved to be bogus, a dead end, then no one need know she had been duped by a crank caller. The one thing Mira could not afford was being seen as gullible.

Or so she told herself late Sunday afternoon when she decided to drive to Maveen Little’s house, having calculated that the reporters who had interviewed her during the day would have finally decamped. A search was on, she knew from WBAL radio. That was today’s story. The mother was secondary.

Maveen Little lived in a West Side neighborhood known as Walbrook Junction, in a complex of low-rises built about a decade before Mira Jenkins was born. It was well kept, by the neighborhood’s standards, with no broken-down cars or garbage on the grounds. Yet it was its middle-class aspirations that unnerved Mira. Every detail-the abandoned Big Wheel on a patch of dirt in the yard that was neither tended nor completely unkempt, the smell of spices and perspiration in the hall, the bedraggled decorations affixed to the hollow doors-only served to emphasize that the people who lived here wanted something more, and probably weren’t going to get it.

“I’m looking for Maveen Little,” she told the sullen man who answered the door, the boyfriend. She recognized him from television.