Every Secret Thing Read online

  For Vicky Bijur and Carrie Feron

  The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.

  —ECCLESIASTES 12: 13–14

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part I The Usual Daily Accidents

  Monday, April 6

  1 “Interesting,” the ophthalmologist said, rolling away from Cynthia…

  Tuesday, April 7

  2 The grease smell hanging in the air behind the New York Fried…

  Thursday, April 9

  3 There are no seasons in the basement of the Clarence Mitchell…

  4 Helen Manning took her lunch outside, thinking she might find a…

  5 “Don’t you want dessert? They make great sundaes here.”

  Saturday, April 11

  6 Ronnie Fuller was used to waking in the morning with strange yearnings.

  7 Wagner’s Tavern had become the county homicide detectives’ bar of…

  Thursday, April 16

  8 The first child disappeared from the Rite Aid at Ingleside Shopping…

  Monday, June 22

  9 Summer finally began. It began over and over again. It began in MidMay,…

  Friday, June 26

  10 It was at the Catonsville branch of the Baltimore County Public…

  Saturday, June 27

  11 “Where’s the baby, Mom?” Alice asked Helen at breakfast. She had…

  12 The last customer of the day at the Bagel Barn was a tapper. She…

  13 Cynthia Barnes was on Nottingham Road, heading home. She found…

  14 Daniel Kutchner eased himself out of Sharon Kerpelman with the…

  Friday, July 3

  15 Brittany Little disappeared late in the afternoon on the first day of the…

  Part II The Dogs of Pompeii

  Saturday, July 4

  16 The elevators in the Baltimore County Public Safety Building were…

  17 Cynthia had awakened that morning to the sound of a familiar song…

  18 Helen Manning had just gotten up when the detectives arrived on her…

  19 Nancy and Infante managed to make good use of their time that…

  20 Mira Jenkins sat in the downtown office of the Beacon-Light on…

  21 Nancy had been experimenting with several postures and stances in…

  22 Gloria Potrcurzski had cried the first time she saw her daughter in…

  23 “She in there?” Infante asked when he returned to the tenth floor…

  Sunday, July 5

  24 Lenhardt unfurled a regional map across a desk. There were the sisters…

  25 “You should go to her.”

  26 Although not much of a reader as a child, Mira Jenkins had never forgotten…

  27 Sharon Kerpelman was forever apologizing for her condo, which was…

  Monday, July 6

  28 Midnight had barely come and gone when a fourteen-year-old boy in…

  29 Cynthia Barnes was no longer interested in food, but she insisted on…

  30 Alice kept her eyes downcast as she walked, studying the ground. The…

  Tuesday, July 7

  31 “This is how it works in Baltimore,” Lenhardt said, perching on the…

  32 “Fuck,” Nancy said after hanging up the pay phone in a back corridor…

  33 Infante and Nancy arrived back at the office to find dozens of cardboard…

  34 Alice had been a baby when Helen Manning decided, in a matter of…

  35 Alice curled her fingers through the gaps of the chain-link fence and…

  36 “It’s my baby,” Alice said. “You can’t arrest someone for taking her…

  Thursday, October 8

  37 “The date is wrong.”

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  By Laura Lippman

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  July 17, Seven Years Ago

  Prologue

  They were barefoot when they were sent home, their dripping feet leaving prints that evaporated almost instantly, as if they had never been there at all. Had it been possible to retrace their literal steps, as so many would try to do in the days that followed, the trail would have led from the wading pool area, where the party tables had been staked out with aqua Mylar balloons, past the snack bar, up the stairs, and to the edge of the parking lot. And each print would have been smaller than the last—losing first the toes, then the narrow connector along the arch, the heels, and finally the baby-fat balls of their feet—until there was nothing left.

  At the curb, they sat to put on their shoes—sneakers for Ronnie, brand-new jellies for Alice, who used whatever money came her way to stay current with the fifth-grade fashion trends at St. William of York. Jellies were the thing to have that summer, on July 17, seven years ago.

  The parking lot’s macadam shone black, reminding Alice of a bubbling, boiling sea in a fairy tale, of a landscape that could vaporize upon touch.

  “It’s like the desert in Oz,” she said, thinking of the hand-me-down books rescued from her mother’s childhood.

  “There’s no desert in Oz,” Ronnie said.

  “Yes, there is, later, in the other books, there’s this desert that burns you up—”

  “It’s not a book,” Ronnie said. “It’s a movie.”

  Alice decided not to contradict her, although Ronnie usually ceded to Alice when it came to matters of books and facts and school. These were the things that Alice thought of as knowledge, a word that she saw in blazing blue letters, for it had stared at her all year from the bulletin board in their fifth-grade classroom. “A wise man is strong; yea, a man of knowledge increases strength.” The A papers of the week were posted beneath that proverb, and Alice had grieved, privately, any week she failed to make the board. Ronnie, who never made it, always said she didn’t care.

  But Ronnie was in one of her dark moods today, long past the point where anyone could tell her anything.

  “I should call your mothers,” Maddy’s mom had fretted, even as she banished them from the party, from the pool. “You shouldn’t cross Edmondson Avenue alone.”

  “I’m allowed,” Ronnie said. “I have an aunt on Stamford, I go to her house when my parents are working. She’s this side of Edmondson.”

  Then, with a defiant look around at the other girls, their faces still stricken and shocked, Ronnie added: “My aunt has Doublestuf Oreos and Rice Krispie treats and all the cable channels, and I can watch anything I want, even if it’s higher than PG-13.”

  Ronnie did have an aunt somewhere nearby, Alice knew, although Stamford didn’t sound right. Neither did the Oreos and Rice Krispies—there was never anything that good to eat in the Fuller house. There was all the soda you could drink, because Mr. Fuller drove a truck for Coca-Cola. And Ronnie was telling the truth about what she watched. The Fullers didn’t seem to care what Ronnie saw. Or did, or said. The only thing that seemed to bother Mr. Fuller was the noise from the television, because the only thing he ever said to Ronnie and her three older brothers was Turn it down, turn it down. Or, for good measure: Turn it down, for Christ’s sake. Just last week, on a rainy afternoon, Ronnie had been watching one of those movies in which teenagers kept getting killed in ever more interesting ways, their screams echoing forever. Alice had buried her head beneath the sofa cushions, indifferent to the stale smells, the crumbs and litter pressing into her cheek. For once, she was almost glad when Mr. Fuller came through the door at the end of his shift. “Jesus, Ronnie,” he had said on a grunt. “Turn it down. I swear there’s just no living with you.”

  “You�
�re blocking the set, Dad” was Ronnie’s only reply. But she must have found the remote, for the screams faded away a few seconds later, and Alice popped her head out again.

  Maddy’s mother didn’t believe the story about Ronnie’s aunt. Alice could see the skepticism in her parted lips, painted a glossy pink, and in her squinty, tired eyes. Maddy’s mother seemed torn between wanting to challenge Ronnie’s lie, and wanting to get away from Ronnie—away from them, although Alice had done nothing, nothing at all, except get a ride to the party from Ronnie’s brother.

  Maddy’s mother licked her lips once, twice, removing some of the pink and most of the gloss, and finally said: “Very well.” Later she told everyone Ronnie had lied to her, that she never would have let two little girls leave if she had known they were going to be unsupervised, if she had known they were going to cross Edmondson Avenue alone. That was the worst thing anyone in Southwest Baltimore could imagine at 2 P.M., on July 17, seven years ago—crossing Edmondson Avenue alone.

  The hill to Edmondson was long and gradual. Alice did not know if there were really ten hills in this neighborhood called Ten Hills, but there were enough slopes to punish short legs. The two girls did not have cover-ups, so they knotted their towels high on their bodies, at the spot where breasts were supposed to hold them. But they had no breasts, only puffy bumps, which they had started keeping in bras just this year. So the towels kept slipping to the ground, tangling at their ankles. Ronnie’s was a plain, no-longer-white bath towel, and she cursed it every time it fell until finally, after tripping over it for the fourth time, she slung it around her neck, not caring if people saw her body. Alice could never walk down the street like that, and she wore a one-piece. Ronnie had a red-and-white bikini, yet she was so thin that the skimpy bottoms seemed to bag on her. The only curve on Ronnie’s body was her stomach, which bowed out slightly. “Like a Biafran baby,” Alice’s mother, Helen, had said. “Oops—I’m dating myself.” Alice had no idea what she was talking about, whether it was good or bad, or even how someone went about dating herself. She just knew that her mother never said Alice looked like a Biafran baby.

  Alice’s navy one-piece had a cutout of a daisy on her belly. Ronnie told her this was queer, and had said this every time she saw Alice in the suit this summer, which was exactly three times—a day-trip to Sandy Point, another poolside birthday party, and today. “Who wants to see a brown daisy on your fat white belly?” she had said when Alice’s mom dropped her this morning at the Fullers’ house before going to work.

  “Vintage,” Alice’s mother had said. “It’s vintage.”

  Ronnie didn’t know what that meant, so she had to shut up. Ronnie liked Alice’s mother and tried to be at her best when she was around. Alice didn’t know what vintage meant, either, but she knew it was good. Her mother had a whole vocabulary of good words that Alice didn’t quite understand. Vintage. Classic. Retro. New-Vo. When all else failed, when Alice was balking at wearing something because the other girls might tease her, Helen Manning would meet her eyes in the mirror and say: “Well, I think it’s exquisite.” This was the word that ended everything, her mom’s way of saying, in her gentle way, Not-Another-Word, I’m-at-the-End-of-My-Patience. Exquisite. The one time Alice had tried to use it, Ronnie had said: “Who wants zits?”

  Yet it was Helen Manning who insisted that Alice play with Ronnie. Ronnie was a summertime-only friend, an in-the-neighborhood friend, the only other didn’t-go-to-camp, didn’t-have-a-pool-membership girl. During the school year, Alice had better friends, friends more like her, who read books and kept their hair neat and tried to wear the right things. Come fall, she was so happy for school to start because it meant a reunion with these real friends.

  Only not this fall. Now that it was time for middle school, a lot of the girls in their class were going to private places. “Real private school,” Wendy had said—not meanly, but a little carelessly, forgetting that Alice wasn’t going with them. Alice thought St. William of York was a real private school. It was real enough that Alice’s mother couldn’t afford it anymore. Next year, Alice would have to go to West Baltimore Middle. Ronnie would, too. Alice’s mother said it wasn’t about the money, that Alice needed to meet All Kinds of People, to be exposed to New Experiences, and, besides, if she stayed in Catholic school much longer, she Might Become a Catholic, God Forbid.

  But Alice knew: It was about the money. In the end, everything was about money—in her house, in the Fuller house, even in the rich kids’ houses. Parents just had different vocabulary words for it—some fancy, some plain—and different ways of talking about it. Or not talking about it, as the case may be.

  In the Fuller family, they screamed and yelled about money, even stole from each other. Earlier this summer, Ronnie had caught her youngest older brother going into her bank and tried to bite him. He had just pushed her down, then taken a hammer and smashed the bank, a Belle from Beauty and the Beast, even though she had a little plug beneath her feet. He didn’t have to break her to get what was inside. And even when the money was freed—mostly pennies and nickels but also quarters, a few of those dollar coins, from when they put the woman on the coin and nobody wanted her—Matthew had kept pounding and pounding on Belle until she was nothing but yellow powder.

  Alice and her mother did not fight about money, did not even speak about it directly, not even when her grandparents visited from Connecticut and said things like: “Well, this is the life you made for yourself.” Once, Alice’s grandfather, Da, had given her a five-dollar bill when she told him she didn’t have the kind of scrunchie that all the other girls had. It was the only time her mother had ever spanked Alice, and they both cried afterward and agreed it would never happen again. Her mother would not spank, and Alice would not make up stories to get money from Da.

  That had been back in the third grade, though, when neon scrunchies were important and Alice hadn’t yet learned to be good. Now the thing to have was jellies, which is why Alice saved her allowance and bought her own, at Target. She had shown them to her school-year-best-friend Wendy, when it was time to open the presents, and Wendy must have approved, for she made room for Alice on the bench she was sharing with two other girls from their class.

  Maddy’s birthday party had been set up near the baby pool, not because they were babies, but because it was behind a fence, and they needed the fence to tie the balloons. Alice found herself counting the gifts. She was always counting. Steps on the stair, lines on the highway, birds flying south for the winter. There were fourteen presents on the table, but only thirteen girls at the party. Did Maddy’s mom bring a present, too? Or did one of the girls away at camp send a gift? Fourteen presents, thirteen girls. Hers was one of the prettiest on the outside—Alice’s mother had wrapped it in blue paper that shimmered—but the shape gave it away. The present was a book, just a book, and Maddy was not the kind of girl who would be happy to get a book. Maddy wanted one of those new T-shirts, the kind that leave your belly showing, and rubber bracelets, and the nail polish you could peel right off. Maddy was the youngest girl in the class, but she knew the most about makeup. She was always sneaking gloss, and green mascara, until the nuns caught her and sent her to the bathroom to wash it off.

  Alice had expected Maddy’s mother to be pretty, too, just so. Yet Maddy’s mother was sort of plain—slender enough to wear a two-piece, but tired-looking, as if being so thin and tanned had worn her out. Even her hair looked tired, like the “before” picture in a conditioner ad. There were mainly two kinds of mothers at St. William of York, mothers who worked and mothers who didn’t. But Maddy’s mom was the Mother Who Used to Work. That’s how she had introduced herself to Alice’s mom, when she called the other day to ask a few questions about Ronnie. Alice knew what was said because she listened in on the extension. Just sometimes.

  “I’m Maddy’s mother. I used to work—at Piper, Marbury?” Alice’s mother made an “ah” sound, as if this were a good thing. She approved of Anything Creative, as she was al
ways telling Alice. But Alice was surprised to find out that Maddy’s mom was a piper. She thought she had been a lawyer. She imagined Maddy’s mother in a green hat with a feather, leading the children out of Hamlin, along with the rats. No, the rats came first, the piper took the children later. Besides, Maddy’s mother must have been a piper in an orchestra to draw such an “ah” sound from Helen, not someone who just played on the street or in circuses. A mother who made music must be fun.

  But Maddy’s Mother Who Used to Work had looked as if she had a headache from the moment the party started. Her forehead had four creases, like two equals signs, and there was a tiny set of parentheses at the bridge of her nose. These seemed to get deeper and deeper as the day wore on, and by the time it was time to open the presents, her face looked like a very hard math problem, maybe even algebra. St. William of York didn’t have a gifted program, but Sister Elizabeth had started giving Alice extra-credit homework in math. This was a secret. Alice wasn’t sure why. She thought it might be because she didn’t have a lot of secrets from her mother, who always seemed to know exactly what she was thinking. Other times, she thought her mom would be disappointed in her for liking math, which wasn’t creative and led to making money, which Helen Manning always said really was the root of all evil—not making money, but caring about it, counting it. When she first heard about the Root of All Evil, Alice had asked: “Is that near Route 40?” And her mother had laughed until she cried, then hugged her and said: “It’s not far, I’ll grant you that.” Later, Alice had tried to make her mother laugh that same way again, telling the same joke over and over, until Helen had snapped: “Don’t be such a pleaser, Alice. You weren’t put on this planet to make other people happy. Not even me. Especially me.”

  Ronnie’s present was the next-to-last to be opened. The paper was red and there were creases in the wrong places, so everyone knew it had been taken off some other present, folded into a square, and reused. It wasn’t obviously Christmas paper—no Santas, no holly, no candy canes, just red—but still, everyone knew. The girl next to Wendy whispered something, who turned to tell Alice. Wendy’s mouth was tickling Alice’s ear when the present emerged, and then everyone fell silent, so the secret was never shared.