Laura Lippman - Every Secret Thing

“Well, there’s doing and there’s doing, of course. Sometimes the innocent are more in need of legal protection than the guilty. This reporter, she keeps saying she can write the story even if no one talks to her. Maybe she’s bluffing. I don’t know. All I know is I didn’t talk to her, and I wouldn’t, either, if I were you.”

“Where does Alice go, He-Helen? When she goes walking?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know.” The repetition revealed the lie.

“Please, Helen. Please .” For the first time, the proper name slipped out without a stutter.

Helen leaned close to the screen, to a spot almost directly across from Ronnie’s forehead. If Ronnie had tilted her head forward, they would have been touching, more or less.

“She never told me, but I saw her once, when I was coming home from the grocery store. She goes up to the pool. She walks around the swim club, looking at people. Sad, isn’t it?”

Ronnie turned to go, then remembered what she had been longing to ask Helen since she came home. “Helen-do you remember the honeysuckle?”

“You mean…”

“The time I tried to make honeysuckle soda and sell it from a stand, like lemonade?”

Some strange emotion flooded Helen’s face, her voice. “Of course I do, Ronnie. Of course I do. You tried to squeeze the juice from the blossoms into a pitcher of sugar water.”

“It tasted awful. And I picked your vines bare. But you didn’t mind. You weren’t mad at all.”

“It was a good idea,” Helen said. “There should be a honeysuckle soda. You always had good ideas, Ronnie.”

“I did?”

“You did, baby. You absolutely did.”

It was past eight, but Infante and Nancy continued to read files, waiting for the moment when inertia turned to exhaustion and they could go home without feeling guilty. Now and then, Nancy forgot what they were looking for and found herself reading about the low-level medical complaints of a Martin or Moore-asthma attacks, chicken pox-as if they were good beach novels. Then she would start skimming again, looking for any trace of Alice Manning.

“I’ll give you five to one that Alice Manning’s file isn’t even in here. Me, I’m just enjoying this tour of our juvenile justice system. A lot of kids get locked up in twenty years. I bet we’ve already met some of them on this side.”

“Charles Maddox sounds familiar.”

“They all sound familiar. That’s what I’m saying. Hey, here’s Metheny.”

“That psycho had a juvenile record?”

“No, not the same one. Now, that would have been interesting.”

“They usually start off with animal torture, those serial killer types. Animal torture or arson.”

“Wow, Infante, those two weeks at Quantico are really paying off. You could learn that much from watching the A &E criminal justice files.”

“Bite me.”

“You wish. Hey, I may owe you five bucks. I just found a Manning.”

She opened the file and checked the first name and the DOB. Yes, it was the right girl. “Poison ivy. Urinary tract infection, yeast infection, yeast infection…”

“I’m eating here.” Infante indicated the bag of chips and soda that were his dinner for the night.

Nancy laughed, lost her place on the page, then resumed reading. “Man, give this poor girl a lifetime prescription of Monistat. She was really prone-shit.”

“What?”

“Fuck me. Fuck us.”

“What?”

“Alice Manning had a baby. Three years ago.”

“How do you have a baby in juvenile detention?”

“How do you get pregnant in juvenile detention?”

Lenhardt must have been listening through his open door, because he materialized by Nancy’s desk, held out his hand for the folder, and seemed to absorb its contents in one quick glance.

“Even in juvy, it works the same way as it does here in the outside world. The egg goes on a date with the sperm.” Lenhardt continued to flip through the file. “Why do you think Middlebrook is closed for renovations? It’s a shithole.”

“Yeah, but-”

“Where there’s a will there’s a way. Darwin, survival of the fittest, all that crap.” He continued to study the file. “It looks like she managed to hide the pregnancy until she was almost six months gone. They just thought she was a fat girl who was prone to yeast infections. And based on this, she never told them who the father was. That space is blank throughout. A fun fact to know and tell, but does it have anything to do with the case at hand, Detective?”

“She had this baby three years ago. Isn’t that what the file says? Alice’s child, wherever she is, would be about three now.”

“So?” Lenhardt asked, but there was no challenge in his voice, no doubt. He simply wanted to hear where Nancy’s mind was going.

“That’s the age of the missing girl.”

Does she look like anyone? Nancy had asked Ronnie Fuller, pushing the photograph of Brittany Little across the table.

Alice, Ronnie had said. She looks like Alice . Ronnie had corrected herself when Nancy challenged her, but the girl’s first instinct had been pure and automatic. Not the daughter of Cynthia and Warren Barnes. Alice . She didn’t look like the Alice that Nancy knew, but Ronnie had known another Alice, a little girl. Ronnie carried another Alice around in her head.

“We know from DNA testing,” Lenhardt said, “that the girl is the biological child of Maveen Little.”

“ We know that,” Nancy agreed. “But Alice doesn’t. All Alice knows is that she had a baby and she doesn’t anymore. Maybe the child was put up for adoption, maybe she died, maybe the grandparents are raising her. But there’s no baby in the Manning household.”

“Why kidnap Brittany Little?”

“A girl who can’t find her own doll might steal another’s. And even Alice never denied taking Olivia Barnes.”

Helen Manning sat in her dark living room. She wished she had some dope, but she wasn’t sure she would smoke it even if she did. Alice would know what it was now. Perhaps Alice had always known. Helen had once thought her daughter docile and obedient, unquestioning. But that belief was long gone, seven years gone.

She knew, this time, that Alice was involved in whatever was going on. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice -that was the key difference between then and now. Seven years ago, Helen had gone about her life blissfully detached from the tragedy unfolding a few blocks away, allowing herself the rationalizations that made such news bearable. The missing child was a baby, not a grade-schooler like Alice. The missing baby had been left untended. The missing baby was probably taken by a baby-sitter, or someone with a specific grudge against that family. There was even a theory, manufactured from nothing, that the child had been taken to get back at the judge. Even then, Helen understood that people needed to tell themselves such stories in order to go on about their lives.

She thought she had managed the trick of telling Alice what she needed to hear, while remaining honest with herself. She had never forgotten that Alice’s father was not dead in a car crash, while Alice accepted this information as an article of faith. Sweet Alice had been content not to press Helen on this issue, not to force her to pile too many lies on the initial one. A considerate child, content to settle for a few stories about romantic dates and the proposal that never was.

Then there were the lies Helen had told her parents, after Alice was arrested. Had Alice really been involved in this horrible thing? Yes, but only because she was weak and impressionable . Did she understand what she was doing? Not really . Why hadn’t she stopped the other child? She says she wasn’t there .