Laura Lippman - Every Secret Thing

“What do you want for the manager’s special?” she asked Clarice.

“Turkey,” Clarice said. “We’re swimming in turkey. They screwed up the order, I guess.”

Ronnie laughed a little, entranced by the image-her, Clarice, and O’lene dog-paddling through mounds of pressed white meat.

“Your friends came back today, I see.”

“Uh-huh.” The detectives had talked to Ronnie on her smoke break, asked the same questions, gotten the same answers.

“Why they keep coming back, Ronnie?”

“I don’t know.”

Clarice let a minute or two go by before she spoke again.

“You got a boyfriend?”

“No.”

“Why you say it like that, like it’s a weird question?”

“Because…because where would I get one?” There had been boys at Shechter, but there had been strict rules about contact, and Ronnie had never dared to break the rules at Shechter.

Clarice misunderstood. “You’re pretty enough. Skinny, but white boys like skinny.” She shook her head at the strange preferences of white men.

“I work here, I go home. I haven’t met anybody since-well, not since a long time.”

“What about when you were in school. You have a boyfriend then?”

Ronnie finally got it: Clarice assumed these visits from the detectives were about someone she dated. It never occurred to her that Ronnie could do anything bad enough, on her own, to get detectives to come around. Clarice thought she was good .

The detectives had been indirect, never mentioning the missing girl by name. They had asked Ronnie what she had done since they saw her last. “Slept,” she said. “Then I came to work. Then I went home. And I slept again.” They asked if she had seen or spoken to Alice, and she shook her head, wondering if Alice was telling them something different. She never knew what Alice might say, what lie she might tell. They asked if she wanted to come talk to them some more, at their office.

“Not really,” she said, and waited to see if they would tell her she had to come talk to them anyway.

“There might be some things you’d rather tell us in private.”

“What things?”

“Whatever. Anything.” The girl detective, the one who looked a little bit like Alice, had something in her hand, a plastic bag.

“I don’t have anything to talk about.”

It was a relief to see them go, at least for now, to be spared another trip to the police station. When she had seen them in the door, she had thought they were coming to take her blood, and she really could not stand the thought of a doctor’s needle pricking her.

She had proposed the blood-sister thing once to Alice, back when they were ten and Ronnie took her to the house in the woods for the first time. Alice had been so scared at first, jumping at the smallest sound. Once there, there was nothing to do, and mingling their blood was just a way to prolong the experience, to avoid the hot walk home. Alice said her blood was too far below the surface to come out with a needle prick, that she was prone to infections and had been told specifically by her mother not to prick her finger for any reason. But Ronnie understood: Alice did not want to be her blood sister. She was saving herself for the other girls in their class, the ones who didn’t say unexpected things or get into fights.

But Alice grew to like the secret house, almost in spite of herself. She was the one who began suggesting they go there all the time-not just in the summertime, but on some weekends as well. She was the one who wanted to fix it up, make it like a real house, but it was too far a walk to carry anything heavy. On Saturday night, Ronnie had thought Alice would be the one to find her, had half expected Alice to come looking for her. Because even when she didn’t know why the police wanted her, she knew they would be looking for Alice, too. They were joined together, whether Alice liked it or not.

She couldn’t put it off any longer. She had to talk to Alice. She had to confront her, remembering to use “good” words. Conflict resolution, the doctor at Shechter Unit had called it. Ask questions. Keep an open mind. Listen to the other person. Focus on finding common ground, areas of agreement. Anger is one letter away from danger, Ronnie.

It was time to push fat Q out of the way once and for all and take her rightful place.

Mira sat in Nostrildamus’s office, every fiber of her being focused on the task of not crying. She could feel the pressure behind her eyelids, at the base of her nose, in her jawbone, even at the edge of her rib cage. But she was not going to cry. She pretended to make eye contact-well, eye-to-nostril contact-with her boss, but she was really focusing on the photograph of his wife, which was turned outward, as if her face were more important to those who visited the office than to the man who inhabited it. His wife was remarkably normal looking, even pretty. Perhaps that was why he made it face outward, so his employees would know he had managed to snag someone normal.

“I don’t see-” she began carefully, making sure her voice didn’t shake or throb in any way.

“I admire your initiative,” Nostrildamus said, using the fake polite tone that was supposed to show how reasonable and good-natured he was. He was always reasonable and good-natured-until someone contradicted him. “But I just don’t think you’ve got a story. What about the girls? Although I guess they’re young women now. Have you talked to them? Have you gotten their side?”

“I just got their names three hours ago,” she said, shaving two hours off the time. It was 5 P.M. and she had been summoned downtown after finally confiding in her boss what she was doing. She had been writing furiously, confident that the revelation that the girls had been questioned was a story in its own right. She needed to go daily, lest one of the television stations get it.

But Nostrildamus didn’t agree. He had asked her to come talk to him, and she was fearful that the story was going to be taken away. Because of who she was, because of what she had done. No one was saying that, of course. Not Nostrildamus or the managing editor, Dominic DiNardo, known as Quasimoto behind his back, because he spent his days hunched over his Motorola cell phone, watching the stock market ticker crawling across the text screen. Mira wondered if the bosses had nicknames for the employees. Probably not. They settled for the consolation of winning all the battles.

“A police source confirmed the girls are suspects,” she said, for the third or fourth time. “We won’t be wrong if we say that.”

“I feel we’re being used by police here,” Nostrildamus said, tilting his head back, so Mira now was staring into the black holes. Sure enough, out came the index finger. “I predict this is a ploy on their part. They’re trying to plant a story to shake some information loose. That’s not our job.”

Mira was stuck. She couldn’t tell him that the police were opposed to the story without undercutting herself, revealing the semantic game she had played with the detective to get her second source.

“If it’s a good story,” she ventured, “why do we care what the police department’s objective is?”

Nostrildamus’s chin jerked back down and he made eye contact with Mira for the first time-momentary eye contact, to be sure, with his eyes sliding sideways after a brief dead-on gaze, but true eye contact, not eye-to-nostril contact. “This paper does not carry water for law enforcement agencies. They do their job, we do ours.”

“The detectives would prefer it if we didn’t do a story. They only confirmed the information because I had it solid, from a source.”

“Another police source,” Nostrildamus said dismissively. “They were playing you, one side against the other.”