Lippman, Laura (39 page)

“So what did happen to my daughters?” Miriam asked. “Where are they? What does any of this have to do with Stan Dunham?”

“Our supposition is that he did abduct and kill your girls and that his son’s wife, Ruth, somehow came to be privy to the details,” Infante said. “We’re not sure why she’s safeguarding her current identity, but chances are she’s wanted on a warrant for something else. Or she knows for sure that Penelope Jackson set the fire that killed Tony Dunham, and she’s trying to protect her, although she keeps insisting she has no relationship with the Jackson woman. When we ask about the car, she takes the Fifth. When we ask her anything, she takes the Fifth.”

Nancy leaned in, pushing a glass of water toward Miriam. “We’ve told her that if she’ll give us Penelope Jackson on the murder of Tony Dunham in Georgia, we might be able to cut a deal with her on the hit-and-run here and whatever else she’s running from, depending how serious it is. But other than admitting she was once Ruth Leibig, she’s just not talking, not even to her own lawyer. Gloria’s urged her to make a deal, to tell us everything she knows, but she seems almost catatonic.”

Miriam shook her head. “That makes two of us. I’m numb. All along I kept telling myself that it was impossible, that she had to be an impostor. I thought I had…insulated myself against hope. Now I realize I wanted it to be true, that I thought by coming here I could make it true.”

“Of course you did,” Lenhardt said. “Any parent would. Look, come tomorrow, Monday, we’re going to be able to piece a lot more things together. We’ll be able to check to see if Tony and Ruth ever divorced, what jurisdiction it was in, stuff like that. We’ll track down people from the school, even if the parish is gone. For the first time, we have leads, solid ones.”

“She’s not Heather,” Willoughby put in, “but she has the answers, Miriam. She knows what happened, if only secondhand. Maybe Dunham confided in his daughter-in-law after the diagnosis, maybe she was his confidante.”

Miriam slumped in Lenhardt’s chair. She looked every bit her age now, and then some, her good posture gone, her eyes sunken. Infante wanted to tell to her that she had accomplished much by coming here, that her trip had been worthwhile, but he wasn’t sure it was true. They would have searched Dunham’s room eventually, even without Miriam identifying the link between her household and his. Visiting the old man hadn’t seemed urgent when his name first surfaced, because of the dementia, but they would have started poking around in his affairs soon enough. Hell, up until this afternoon Infante hadn’t even been convinced that Dunham was connected to anyone but Tony Dunham and the ever-elusive Penelope Jackson. That was the one link they had established independently—mystery woman to Penelope Jackson to Tony Dunham to Stan Dunham.

Still, if he was being honest with himself, he had to second-guess his own decision not to visit Dunham as soon as he had the name. Was it because Stan Dunham was a police? Had he hesitated, made a bum decision because he just couldn’t believe that one of their own could be involved in such a sick crime? Should they have locked her up the first night and trusted the accommodations at the Women’s Detention Center to provide all the encouragement she needed to talk? She had played them all, even Gloria, her own lawyer, stalling them, trying to figure out a way to keep from telling them who she was. But she wasn’t gutsy enough, or depraved enough, to try to play the mother that way. Maybe that was the one shred of decency in her, the place where she drew the line. She had run because she didn’t want to confront the mother.

Or maybe she had run because she believed that Miriam, with a glance, could do the one thing that they had failed to do this past week—eliminate with certitude the possibility that she was Heather Bethany.

“Walk her by me,” Miriam said softly. “I don’t want to talk to her—that is, I do, I want to scream at her, ask her a thousand questions, then scream some more—but I know I mustn’t do any of those things. I just want to look at her.”

MIRIAM WAITED in the lobby of the Public Safety Building. She thought of putting on dark glasses, then almost laughed out loud at her own heightened sense of drama. After all, this woman didn’t know her. If she’d ever seen Miriam, it was in photographs from that time, and while Miriam knew she had aged exceptionally well, she would never be mistaken for her thirty-eight-year-old self. Fact is, her thirty-nine-year-old self had barely resembled the thirty-eight-year-old version. She remembered noticing how she had changed when the newspapers ran those photos on the first-year anniversary, that her face had shifted irrevocably. It wasn’t age or grief, but something more profound, almost as if she’d been in an accident and the bones in her face had been put back together again, leaving it similar to what it had once been, but vaguely off.

The elevators were frustratingly slow, as she had learned on her own descent, and the wait in the lobby seemed interminable. But, at last, Infante and Nancy got off the elevator, flanking a slight, blond woman, holding her loosely by the elbows. Her head was tilted forward, so it was hard to see her face, but Miriam studied her—Ruth, was that it?—as best as she could, took in the narrow shoulders, the slim hips, the comically youthful trousers, so wrong for a woman verging on middle age.
If she were my daughter
, Miriam thought,
she’d have better taste than that
.

The woman looked up, and Miriam caught her eye. Miriam didn’t mean to hold the gaze, but she found she couldn’t turn away. Slowly she rose, blocking the path of the trio, clearly unnerving Infante and Nancy. This was not part of the plan. She was to sit and watch, nothing more. She had promised. They probably thought she was going to slap or push her, spit imprecations at the latest charlatan to appropriate Miriam’s life story for her own amusement.

“Mi—Ma’am,” Infante said, correcting himself, protecting her name. “We’re escorting a prisoner. It’s only because of her injury that she’s not in handcuffs. Please stand back.”

Miriam ignored him, taking the woman’s left hand in hers, squeezing it as if to say,
This won’t hurt a bit
, then pushing up the sleeve of the cardigan sweater she wore, careful not to disturb the bandaged forearm. On the upper arm, she found the mark she sought, the splayed and oh-so-faint scar of a vaccination that had been burst by the helpful application of a flyswatter, missing the fly but scattering pus and blood, creating a wound that had taken weeks to heal, a scab that had been picked continually despite all admonitions to leave it alone, that such picking would leave a permanent blemish. There it was, a ghostly mark, so faint that no one else would notice it. In fact, it was possible that it wasn’t even there, but Miriam believed she saw it, so she did.

“Oh, Sunny,” Miriam said, “what in the world is going on?”

The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round
.

They wanted to know what she was thinking, what was running through her head, and that was it, exactly: The childhood song had come back to her that afternoon on the Number 15 bus, Heather sitting across the aisle from her, humming in that happily infuriating, infuriatingly happy way she had. Heather was still a little
girl
. Sunny was not. Sunny was about to become a woman. This bus, the Number 15, was taking other people to the mall, on ordinary errands, but it was taking her to meet her husband.

Buses were magic. Another bus had brought her to this place in her life, this moment where everything would change. She was running away, just as her mother had. Her
real
mother, the one with blond hair and blue eyes like hers. Her real mother was someone who would have understood her, someone to whom she could have spoken of all the things locked up in her heart, secrets so explosive that she had never written them down anywhere, even in her diary. Sunny Bethany was fifteen, and she was in love with Tony Dunham, and every song she heard, every
sound
she heard, seemed to pulse with that information, even the thrumming wheels on the bus.

The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round.

It had begun on another bus, the school bus, after the route was reversed at the other parents’ insistence and Sunny ended up riding alone in the afternoons.

“Mind if I put the radio on?” the driver asked one day. He was a substitute, young and good-looking, not at all like Mr. Madison, who normally drove the route. “But you have to keep it a secret. We’re not supposed to play the radio. My father, who owns the bus company, he’s really strict.”

“Sure,” she said, embarrassed at the way her voice squeaked. “I won’t tell.”

Then—not the next time he drove, or the time after that, or even the time after that, but the fourth time, in November, when the weather was turning colder: “Why don’t you move up here to the front seat and talk to me, keep me company? It gets awfully lonely, sitting up here by myself.”

“Sure,” she said, gathering her books to her chest, feeling stupid when the bus hit a pothole and she banged her hip hard against one of the seats. But Tony didn’t laugh at her, or mock her. “My apologies,” he said. “I’ll try to keep the ride smooth from here on out, my lady.”

Another time—the fifth time, or maybe the sixth. Their encounters were frequent enough to blend together now, although she seldom saw him more than two or three times a month. “Do you like this song? It’s called ‘Lonely Girl.’ It reminds me of you.”

“Really?” She wasn’t sure she did like the song, but she listened closely, especially to the final line, about the lonely boy.
Did that mean
—but she kept her eyes on her notebook, a blue binder. Other girls inked the names of their crushes on the cover, but she never had dared. A few weeks later, she tried doodling a tiny “TD” in the lower right-hand corner. “What does that stand for?” Heather had asked, nosy Heather, always spying Heather. “Touchdown,” Sunny said. Later she transformed the initials into three-dimensional shapes she had learned to draw in geometry.

More and more, Tony talked about himself, over the music. He had tried to join the army, go to ’Nam, but they wouldn’t take him, much to his mother’s relief and his disappointment. Sunny didn’t know there were people who
wanted
to fight in the war. Tony had a heart defect or something, mitral valve prolapse. She couldn’t believe there was anything wrong with his heart. He had feathered hair, which he groomed frequently with a small brush he kept tucked in the pocket of his jeans, and he wore a gold chain. He smoked Pall Malls, but only after the other kids had gotten off the bus. “Don’t rat me out,” he said, winking at her in the rearview mirror. “You sure are pretty. Has anyone ever told you that? You should wear your hair like Susan Dey. But you’re already a cutie.”

The wheels on the bus went round and round.

“I really wish we could spend time together. Real time, not just these bus rides. Wouldn’t that be nice, if we could be alone somewhere?” She thought it might be, but she didn’t see how it could be arranged. She knew without asking that her parents, as open and freewheeling as they professed to be, wouldn’t let her date a twenty-three-year-old bus driver. She wasn’t sure, however, what would bother them more—the twenty-three part, the bus-driver part, or the wanted-to-go-to-’Nam part.

Eventually, Tony said he wanted to marry her, that if she met him at the mall some Saturday, they could drive up to Elkton, get married at the little chapel where people from New York got married, because there was no waiting period, no blood tests required. No, she said. He couldn’t be serious. “I am, I will. You’re so pretty, Sunny. Who wouldn’t want to marry you?” She remembered that her mother, her real one, had run away at seventeen to marry her true love, Sunny’s real father, and people grew up faster now. She heard her parents say that all the time.
Kids grow up so fast now
.

The next time she saw him, the week of March 23, she said yes, she would meet him, and now, a mere six days later, she was on another bus, heading to see him. She was going to go on her honeymoon tonight. She shivered a bit, thinking about that. They had never been able to do more than kiss, and only a little, but it had made her insides flip. Tony’s father knew his schedule too well, questioned him closely if he returned home late, sniffed the interior of the bus and asked if he’d been smoking. It was funny, but being the son of the man who owned the bus company didn’t get Tony any special privileges, just the opposite. The only reason Tony still lived at home, at age twenty-three, was that his mother would be heartbroken if he left.

“But we won’t live with them, after we’re married,” he said. “She won’t expect that. We’ll get an apartment in town, or maybe over to York.”

“Like the Peppermint Patty?”

“Like the Peppermint Patty.”

The wheels on the bus went round and round.

AND THEN HEATHER had to go and ruin everything, following Sunny not only to the mall but into
Chinatown
, where Sunny was supposed to rendezvous—his word—with Tony. Once they were thrown out, Sunny had fled, not sure what to do. How would she find Tony now? She went to Harmony Hut. Music was their common bond after all, the thing that had brought them together. Eventually he did find her, but he was angry and out of sorts, as if the ruined plan were all her fault. Then Heather had found
them
, spotted Sunny standing in Harmony Hut, right in front of the Who records, holding a man’s hand. Heather began making a fuss, saying the same man had tried to talk to her by the organ store, that he was a creep. She said she was going to tell. They had to take her with them, right? If they left Heather alone, Sunny told Tony, she would tattle to their parents, and that would ruin everything. They promised Heather candy and money, said she could go home after they were married, that she could be the flower girl, the witness. The flower-girl part seemed to win her over. But out in the parking lot Heather decided she didn’t want to go, and Tony grabbed her a little roughly and pushed her into the car. In the scuffle she dropped her purse, but Tony refused to go back for it, and she had cried and whined all the way up the highway about that stupid purse. “I lost my purse. With my Bonne Belle. And my comb, the souvenir one from Rehoboth Beach. I lost my purse.”