Laura Lippman - Every Secret Thing

Infante picked up the upended box and started going through the scattered files.

“Holly’s looking at the earring,” he said. “But she doesn’t think there’s anything she can pull off it. ‘Now if it were a nose ring,’ she says, ‘I might have a shot.’ And a tongue piercing might have a residue of saliva. Or so she says.”

“Too much information.”

“Yeah,” Infante agreed.

“Sort of like the situation we’ve got here.”

“Yeah, but they’re here and we’re here, so what the fuck. Holly might pull something off that earring. And I can’t think of a single thing to do, and I can’t bear to go home. Working a case without a body is the worst.”

“Yeah.” She took a seat at her own desk, dipped into a file box, and began scanning the pages there. But it took a second for her eyes to focus, for her to leave her past behind.

Alice had been a baby when Helen Manning decided, in a matter of minutes, to buy the house on Nottingham Road. “A decision is impulsive only if it’s wrong,” she liked to say, and no one ever heard her say that she regretted buying the Cotswold-like cottage plunked down on this oversize lot in a sea of brick rowhouses and shabby apartment buildings. For years, she had compared it with the kind of house seen on the painted screens of East Baltimore, usually behind a pond with gliding swans. Lately, people had begun to notice that it bore a marked resemblance to the landscapes in those strangely popular mall paintings, the ones from the man who claimed he was the painter of light. Helen was less than pleased by this observation.

For Ronnie Fuller, who had never seen a painted screen and who had been locked up while the painter of light opened his mall stores and catalog company, the Mannings’ house was a fairy tale house, a place so delicious and enticing that she wouldn’t have been surprised to bite into a shingle and find it was gingerbread. Indifferent to the signs of neglect and rot that advertised the lack of a full-time man on the premises, Ronnie saw only the things that Helen had done to make the house distinctive-chipped gray-green statues tucked among the wild roses, the back fence heavy with honeysuckle vines, the rose-colored shutters against the sage-green frame. Safe as houses, people said, but the phrase only made sense to Ronnie when she was looking at Helen Manning’s cottage.

Tonight, the front door was open, the screen door latched. Ronnie stood on the tiny porch, listening to the whirring of fans throughout the house. As always, there was music playing, fancy music. This was Helen’s choice for early evening. It was only when midnight had come and gone that she allowed herself to play the records from her youth, lowering the volume in deference to the neighbors. They were actually records, not CDs, played on an old stereo. “If you take care of your things, they last,” Helen had told Ronnie more than once, for Ronnie was careless with possessions. She didn’t mean to be, but she was.

Helen had taken care of all her old things. The house on Nottingham was filled with her books, her clothes, and even her toys-tiny stuffed animals from Germany that she said you couldn’t buy today for a hundred dollars, old board games like Masterpiece and Life, a red double-decker bus from England, papier-mâché acrobats from Mexico, metal windups, pristine Barbie dolls.

The best toys, by far, were Helen’s City Mouse and Country Mouse houses, which she sometimes allowed Ronnie to take from the highest shelf in the living room and set up on the rug. “Which do you like best?” Helen had asked, and Ronnie believed the question was a test. Most little girls would pick the City Mouse, with her red velvet canopy bed, silver-plated mirrors, and outfit of orange satin. Alice loved the City Mouse. So Ronnie said the Country Mouse, who wore a checked apron and carried a broom. “She’s my favorite, too,” Helen said.

The Helen who came to the door on this evening looked the same to Ronnie as the Helen she had known seven years ago. But then the light was very dim, inside and out. She was wearing bright orange Capris, black ballet flats, and a man’s Hawaiian shirt that echoed the orange shades of the Capris. She looked beautiful.

“Vintage,” Ronnie said. It wasn’t what she had meant to say the first time she saw her, but Helen smiled.

“Hello, Ronnie.” She had a little sniff, as if she had allergies.

“Hi, He-Helen.” It had always been Helen, never Mrs. or even Ms. Manning, but Ronnie had not said the name out loud for so long. She had never spoken of Helen to anyone, not even her doctor. Just their secret, Helen said, and Ronnie had kept it.

“You grew up so pretty. I always thought you would.”

“I’m not pretty,” she said automatically.

“Well, you should tweeze your eyebrows in the middle, and wear your hair back. But you’re a knockout. Enjoy that body. You won’t have it forever, although I know it’s hard to imagine. Metabolism always comes to call. Happened to me at thirty, on the dot.”

“Oh.” The conversation confused Ronnie. She had hoped for something more momentous from Helen. A hug? An apology? Whatever she had expected, it wasn’t trying to speak through a screen door, with Helen so oddly detached, talking about eyebrows and hair and Ronnie’s body, which was embarrassing. “I was looking for Alice.”

“I don’t think Alice wants to see you, Ronnie.”

She’s dying to see me. This thought did not find voice, but it pierced Ronnie’s head, as clear and pure a sound as the singer trilling away in Helen’s house. Alice wanted to see Ronnie as much as Ronnie wanted to see Alice.

“Is she here? He-Helen?”

“No. I don’t know where she is. I don’t know where she goes and I don’t know what she does.”

“Does she have a job?”

“She says she can’t find one. But you did, so I have to think it’s a lie.”

Did Helen mean to be unkind? If stupid Ronnie can find a job, anyone can. But Helen had never been cruel to Ronnie on purpose, just careless at times. She probably meant that Ronnie had done well, so Alice could, too.

“What does she do, if she’s not working?”

“She says she walks. For weight loss. Although-well, between us, she is bigger than ever. I’m afraid I didn’t do well by her when I went wading in her father’s gene pool. Between us.”

Between us. There was the magic phrase. Between us, Ronnie, I think you’re the one who has the real imagination. Between us, Ronnie, I think you have an artistic temperament. Between us, Ronnie, I sometimes wonder if a bad fairy switched you and Alice at birth. Have you heard about changelings? Because you are so much more like me than she is. Alice is a good girl, a sweet girl, but you’re a pistol, Ronnie. You’re not scared of anything, are you, Ronnie? Between us, Ronnie, we’re two peas in a pod.

But the words didn’t seem to mean anything to Helen.

“Do you think Alice will be home soon? It’s almost dark.”

“I don’t know, Ronnie. But I don’t think you should hang around here.”

“Don’t you-” Her voice tore a little.

“Oh, no, baby, I’m happy to see you. I really am. But a reporter came by here not more than an hour ago. She wants to write a story about you and Alice. Now, Alice has a lawyer, a smart one this time-well, she has the stupid one again, but the stupid one now works with a smart one-and they’re going to take care of my baby. They promised me that they’ll scare that reporter so badly she won’t even think about putting Alice’s name in the paper. Have you got a lawyer?”

“I haven’t done anything.” Then, remembering what Helen knew, “Not this time.”