Lippman, Laura (32 page)

“I got in early, and she’s going to be at least two hours late according to the monitors. I thought I had time to run up here, see how things were going.”

“Nancy’s doing good,” Lenhardt said. “She’s taking her time. She’s had her going almost four hours now, and she keeps bringing her up to the edge of the actual kidnapping, then going back to the beginning. It’s driving her crazy. She’s bursting to tell us the bad shit, for some reason.”

Infante glanced at his watch. “I’ll have to leave for the airport by nine-thirty. You think I’ll catch the main show?”

Lenhardt balled his fists and rotated his wrists, peering at his clenched fingers. “Magic Eight Ball says all signs look good.”

8:50 P.M.

“So you’re outside, and…is it dark?”

“No, it’s still light. It’s March twenty-ninth. The days were getting longer. We got outside—”

“No alarm on the door?”

“No, no alarm on the door. And there was a van. He opened the door, and Sunny was inside. Before I could register anything—the fact that she was lying down, tied up, the fact that this wasn’t a police car—he had caught me up and thrown me back there. I fought, if you could call it that, a little girl flailing her arms at a grown man. But it was completely ineffectual. I wonder—do you think he got Sunny the same way, with the same story? How did he
know
us? Have you figured
that
out, Detective? How did Stan Dunham know us? Why did he target us?”

“Stan Dunham’s in a retirement community out in Sykesville.” A pause. “Did you know that?”

“It’s not as if we’re
pen pals
.” Said with dry disgust. Yet without worry, Willoughby noticed. Again, they had considered carefully what they would say about Dunham. They had no intention of telling her that he couldn’t contradict his own name at this point. But the fact that he was still alive didn’t seem to make as much of an impression as it should have. Even if she were telling the truth, shouldn’t she be more taken aback by the revelation that her captor, the man who had ruined her life, was just thirty miles west of where she sat?

“Okay, okay—when he grabbed you, did you…lose anything? Leave anything behind?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that. Did you leave anything behind?”

Her eyes widened. “The purse. Of course, I dropped my purse. How I mourned that purse. I know this will sound weird to you, but it was easier, in the back of that van, to worry about the purse than to think about…” She began to cry, and her lawyer handed her a tissue, although these were the kind of tears that no mere tissue could sop up, hard as rain.

“Can you describe the purse?”

“D-d-d-d-escribe it?” It was all Willoughby could do not to reach out and grab the sergeant’s hand. This was it, the moment that he and Nancy had planned this morning.

“Yes, could you describe it? Tell me what it looked like, what was in it?”

She appeared to be thinking, which didn’t seem right to Willoughby. She knew or she didn’t.

The lawyer spoke for the first time. “C’mon, Nancy. What does it matter if she can describe a purse she had when she was eleven?”

“She described her Snoopy watch in pretty definite detail.”

“It was thirty years ago. People do forget things. I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday—”

“Denim with red rickrack,” she said firmly, her voice rising over her lawyer’s. “Attached to a set of wooden handles by a set of white buttons. The purse had a muslin base, and you could attach various covers to change the look.”

“And what was in it?”

“Why…money, of course. And a little comb.”

“Not a key or a lipstick?”

“Sunny had the key, and I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup yet, just Bonne Belle.”

“That was the complete inventory of the purse?”

“What?”

“A little comb, Bonne Belle, and money. How much?”

“Hardly any. Maybe five dollars, less what I’d spent for the movie ticket. And I’m not sure I had a Bonne Belle. I just told you that’s all I was allowed to have. I can’t remember everything. God, do you even know what’s in your purse right now?”

“Billfold,” Nancy Porter said. “Tic Tacs. Diaper wipes. I have a six-month-old. Lipstick. Receipts—”

“Okay, you can. I can’t. Hey, when they stopped me Tuesday night, I didn’t even know why my billfold wasn’t in my purse.”

“We’ll get to that.”

9:10 P.M.

“So once in the van…”

“We drove. We drove and we drove. It seemed like a very long time, but maybe my sense of time was off. He stopped at some point and got out. We tried the door—”

“You weren’t tied up, like your sister?”

“No, he was in a hurry. He just grabbed me and threw me in. I have no idea how he subdued Sunny.”

“But you said, ‘We tried the door’—”

“I untied her, of course. I didn’t let her stay tied up. He stopped, we tried the door, it was locked from the outside. And there was mesh between the rear of the van and the passenger compartment, so we couldn’t get out that way.”

“Did you scream?”

She looked at Nancy blankly.

“While he was outside the van. Did you scream, try to draw attention to yourselves?”

“No. We didn’t know where we were, if there was anyone out there to hear us. And he had threatened us, told us horrible things would happen—so no, we didn’t scream.”

Nancy glanced at the tape recorder but didn’t speak. That was good, Willoughby thought. She was using silence as a goad, waiting the woman out.

“We were in the country. There were…crickets.”

“Crickets? In March?”

“Some strange sound. Strange to us. Perhaps it was the absence of sound.” She turned to Gloria. “Do I have to talk about this part in detail? Is it really necessary?” Then, without waiting for an answer, she began the story that she claimed to be so loath to tell. “He took us into this house in the middle of nowhere. A farmhouse. He wanted to…do things. Sunny fought him, and he killed her. I don’t think he meant to. He seemed surprised when it happened. Sad, even. Is that possible? That he could have been sad? Maybe he had always meant to kill us, kill both of us, but then it happened and he realized that killing wasn’t something he was equipped for. He killed her, and then he told me that I could never leave him. That I would have to stay with him and his family, be a part of it. And if I didn’t…well, if I didn’t, then he would have no choice but to do to me what he’d done to Sunny. She’s dead, he said. I can’t bring her back. But I can give you a new life, if you let me.”

Willoughby had a vision of a highway, the way it shimmered sometimes in the late summer, how the air seemed to get wavy at sunset. There was a similar quality in this story, although he couldn’t quite put a finger on it. It began with the crickets, even though she had disavowed them. All he knew was that she was moving in and out of the truth, that parts were accurate but others had been… molded. Shaped. To whose expectations? To what purpose?

“His family? So there were other people involved in this?”

“They didn’t know everything. I’m not sure what he told his wife and son—maybe that I was a runaway who he’d saved from the streets in Baltimore, a girl who couldn’t go home for whatever reason. All I know is that he went to the library and read old newspapers until he found what he needed—a story about a fire in Ohio, several years before. An entire family had been killed. He took the name of the youngest child and applied for a Social Security number in that name. With that, he was able to enroll me at the parish school up in York.”

“Without anything but a Social Security number?”

“It was a parish school, and he told them that it was all I had, that everything had been destroyed and it would be months before he could get a birth certificate. He’d been a police officer, well respected. People generally wanted to please him.”

“So he enrolls you in school, sends you off every day, and you don’t try to tell anyone who you are or what you’ve been up to?”

“This didn’t happen right away. He waited until the next fall. For almost six months, I lived under his roof, with virtually no freedom. I was pretty broken down by the time I started going to school. I’d been told every day for six months that no one cared about me, that no one was looking for me, that I was dependent on him for everything. He was a grown-up—and a cop. I was a child. I believed him. Besides—I was being raped every night.”

“And his wife put up with this?”

“She turned a blind eye to it, as families do. Or maybe she rationalized that I was at fault, that I was a baby prostitute who seduced her husband. I don’t know. Over time you get numb to it. It was a chore, something I was expected to do. We lived between Glen Rock and Shrewsbury, which felt like a million miles away from Baltimore. Up there no one ever spoke about the Bethany girls. That was something that happened down in the city. And there were no Bethany girls anymore. Just a Bethany girl.”

“Is that where you live now? Is that where you’ve been all this time?”

She smiled. “No, Detective. I left there a long time ago. When I was eighteen, he gave me money, put me on a bus, and told me I was on my own.”

“And why didn’t you take the bus back to Baltimore, find your folks, tell everyone where you’d been?”

“Because I didn’t exist anymore. I had been Ruth Leibig, only survivor of a tragic fire in Columbus, Ohio. Normal teenager by day, consort by night. There was no Heather Bethany. There was nothing to go back to.”

“So that’s the name you’ve been using, then. Ruth Leibig?”

A broader smile. “You won’t get it that easy, Detective. Stan Dunham taught me well. I learned how to search old newspapers, too, how to find unclaimed identities and make them mine. It’s harder now, of course. People get Social Security cards earlier and earlier. But for someone my age there are still lots of little dead children’s names to use. And you’d be surprised how easy it is to get birth certificates if you have some basic information and a few…skills.”

“What kind of skills?”

“That’s none of your business.”

Gloria nodded. “Look, she’s given you the story. Now you know.”

“Here’s the thing,” Nancy said. “Everything she’s given us so far leads to a dead end. The farm, where all this happened? Gone, subdivided years ago, and there’s no record that any human remains were uncovered.”

“Check the parish school, Sisters of the Little Flower. You’ll find Ruth Leibig on the rolls.”

“Stan Dunham is in a hospice, dying—”

“Good,” she said.

“His wife has been dead for almost ten years. Oh, and the son? He died in an accidental fire just three months ago. In Georgia. Where he was living with Penelope Jackson.”

“He’s dead? Tony’s
dead
?”

If Willoughby had been younger, he might have shot out of his chair. Infante and Lenhardt, already standing, stiffened in their posture, leaned toward the speaker-box that was bringing the words to them.

“Did you—” Lenhardt began, even as Infante said, “She wasn’t surprised about the father, didn’t give a shit about Penelope Jackson or Georgia, but the son has caught her off guard. And she knew his name, although Nancy didn’t provide it.”

On the other side: “Be still, Heather,” Gloria said. “Now. Nancy, if you would give us a minute.”

“Sure. Take all the time you want.”

NANCY HAD WALKED out of the room, but she was practically prancing when she joined the circle of detectives. The girl was pleased with herself, as well she should be, Willoughby thought. She had done a good job. The thing about Pincharelli was a key omission. And Miriam had always insisted that Heather had taken an unusually large amount of money that day to the mall, because her bank at home was empty.

But it wasn’t good enough. He was the only one in the room who knew they had fallen short of proving she wasn’t Heather Bethany. He’d stake his life on the fact that she was lying, but he couldn’t prove it.

“Well?” she said to the three men.

“We waited for you,” Lenhardt said.

Willoughby picked up the envelope at his feet and opened it, although he knew what he would find inside. A blue denim purse, with red rickrack. Even within the light-deprived confines of an envelope, it had faded a little over the years, yet it was just as it had been described, except for the contents. But that’s only because there were no contents. The purse had been found next to a Dumpster, turned inside out, a tire mark on its side. The supposition had always been that Heather had dropped it during the abduction and that some opportunistic scum had stumbled on it, stripped it of whatever cash or items it contained, and tossed it aside.

Yet they couldn’t contradict her memory of what it had contained, because they didn’t know. Here was the purse, exactly as she’d described it. So if she was Heather Bethany, why didn’t she remember seeing her sister’s music teacher? Had Pincharelli been lying all those years ago? Had he broken down and told Willoughby what he wanted to hear because there was yet another secret he was hiding? He was dead, too. Everywhere they turned, people were dead or dying. That was the natural order of things, over thirty years. Dave was gone. Willoughby’s Evelyn was gone. Stan Dunham’s wife and son were gone, and the man himself was as good as gone. Penelope Jackson, whoever she was, had disappeared, leaving behind nothing but a green Valiant. And the only thing they’d been able to establish with any certainty was that the woman in the interrogation room was not Penelope Jackson. Yet she had described the purse. Did that make her Heather Bethany? He thought back to the shimmer in the air, the moment he was sure that she was lying.

“Fuck me,” Lenhardt said.

“Well, the mom will be here soon,” Infante said. “It would have been nice if we didn’t have to put her through that, if we could have told her when she landed what was what, but at least DNA’s definitive. When we finally get it. Even with a rush, it will take a day or two.”

“Yeah,” Willoughby said. “About that…”

10:25 P.M.

The plane seemed to drone as sleepily as its passengers, most of whom were tired and disgruntled from being more than two hours past their scheduled arrival. In her first-class window seat, a luxury created by the necessity of buying a last-minute ticket, Miriam couldn’t begin to sleep, and she stared at the floor of clouds below the jet. It took a long time to break through the cloud cover, but Baltimore was finally beneath her, for the first time in almost twenty years. It was vast in a way that did not match her memories, its lights spread across a far wider area, but she hadn’t flown into Baltimore since 1968. The airport had still been called Friendship then, and Miriam was returning from Canada by way of New York. In the summer after the riots, it had seemed a felicitous time to take her children to Ottawa, let them spend an extended vacation with their grandparents. Oh, how dressed up they had gotten for that return trip, the girls in matching dresses purchased by Miriam’s mother at Holt Renfrew—striped shifts with scarves that attached to the collars with snaps. Sunny had been a mess twenty minutes into the journey, but Heather barely had a crease in her dress even upon landing. People could meet you at airport gates then. She remembered Dave, waiting for them inside the terminal, pale and round-shouldered, so beaten down by his job. A few years later, when he approached her with his dream of opening a store, that image came back to her, and she readily said yes. She had wanted him to be happy. Even when she was miserable, she had wanted nothing less for Dave than some sort of peace.