Every Secret Thing Read online

  A new summer ritual was also under way that year—the disappearance of children, little girls. They went missing from parks and stores, from yards and porches. But no one noticed, because the girls reappeared minutes later, before their absence had been logged. Even the girls themselves did not seem to recognize the extraordinary thing that had happened to them. Even if they had, they couldn’t have told anyone, for they were toddlers, too young to speak, much less compare notes.

  By the time the vernal equinox actually arrived, summer already seemed careworn and used. This happened to be the day that Nancy put on her best suit and went to the courthouse, perhaps the ugliest public building in all of Baltimore County, no small distinction. There, she testified before the grand jury, which needed little encouragement to hand up capital murder indictments against three of the four boys in the New York Fried Chicken killing. The fourth would be tried on robbery and manslaughter charges, which was the deal he had cut for himself. He chose to risk the near-sure death sentence of being a witness, to the guaranteed death sentence given to anyone convicted of a capital crime in Baltimore County.

  Duty done, Nancy and Infante met their sergeant at the Italian place on Washington, the chain restaurant that she liked so much. Lenhardt always insisted on treating, claiming the county would pick up the tab, but Nancy suspected these lunches came out of his pocket.

  “She going for death?” Infante asked Lenhardt, the she in question being the Baltimore County prosecutor.

  “She always does,” Lenhardt said, slathering a bread stick with the restaurant’s trademark tapenade. Nancy was pretending to enjoy a small house salad.

  “Good,” Infante said.

  “But the victim’s mother might not want it,” Nancy said. She was remembering the woman she had met back in April, a woman whose life had tested her faith yet never weakened it. The walls of the woman’s rowhouse had featured a riotous competition between God’s only son and her only son, with Jesus edging out Franklin Morris. “She’s Christian.”

  “So?” Infante said. “Aren’t we all?”

  “I mean a real one. Very devout. And you know the state’s attorney won’t go for the death penalty if the relatives don’t want it.”

  “Christian?” Lenhardt pretended to be indignant. “Well, eye for an eye is the oldest Christian rule of all.”

  “I guess she’s more New Testament, turn the other cheek, like.”

  “The New Testament,” Lenhardt said, wagging his breadstick, “is the New Coke of religion. They need to throw that sucker out and go back to the original recipe.”

  Nancy gasped so hard, trying not to laugh, that she almost swallowed a cherry tomato from her salad. She was no more religious than the average lapsed Catholic, but it was not a subject about which she could joke. She felt too guilty, being AWOL from St. Casimir’s all these years.

  “Anyway, you let that nice Christian lady sit through a little testimony, see a few crime scene photos, and she’ll be ready to give those guys the injection her own self.”

  Infante nodded sagely. It was one of his few moves that got under Nancy’s skin, that wise nod, as if there were things that only he and Lenhardt could understand.

  Lenhardt was on a roll, the topic of religion having struck his fancy for some reason. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. And that’s the New Testament, by the way.”

  Nancy didn’t know the Bible that well, but she was determined to argue the point: “Is mine. His, not ours. So isn’t God saying we’re not supposed to be in the vengeance business?”

  “He’s saying we do it for him, so we better do it right.” But Lenhardt was guessing at the meaning, too. Not a one of them at the table—two Catholics and a Lutheran—at least she thought Lenhardt was a Lutheran—had the credentials to play even half-assed theologians.

  “I’ll tell you what I know about revenge,” Infante piped up. He pronounced the word REE-venge, as if it were an act of repetition, not reaction. “It feels good. That’s why God wants it for himself. He knows how much fun it is.”

  “I feel a reminiscence coming on,” Lenhardt said. “Wife number one or two?”

  “Two.”

  “Didn’t you cheat on Two?” Nancy asked, knowing he had.

  “Yeah, but I felt bad about it. You know, adultery isn’t what kills a marriage, it’s just—”

  “A symptom,” Nancy said, winning a big laugh from Lenhardt, which made her feel good. Infante’s marital history and the accompanying litany of excuses were well known to them.

  “Fuck you,” he said, but without bite. This, too, was part of the litany, the beginning of Infante’s marital beatitudes. “Yes, I slipped up, and she caught me, but I wanted to get back with her so bad, I was willing to do anything. Only she didn’t want me anymore. She wanted my house and my furniture, though. And all our money, not that there was so much of it, but her lawyer told her to drain every penny out of our joint accounts. The one thing she didn’t get from me was my key.”

  “Really?” Nancy had been working on raising one eyebrow—she thought it was an expression that might have its uses in interrogations—and she tried it now. She caught a glimpse of her face in the metal napkin holder and the effect was far from what she intended. Even allowing for the distortion of the napkin holder, she looked silly, like a cartoon character trying to be menacing. “Calculating as she was, and she didn’t get the key from you, or change the locks?”

  “Well”—Infante’s grin belied the hangdog dip of his head—“maybe I had a copy made one day, for emergencies, and she forgot about that. At any rate, one night when she was out, I let myself in.”

  “To what purpose?” Lenhardt asked.

  “That was the funny thing. I didn’t really have a plan when I went in. It was one A.M.—”

  “Was this an alcohol-related crime, Mr. Infante?” Lenhardt pulled out his pad, pretended to take notes.

  Again, his grin confessed all. “So I’m there, in my old living room, and I can already see how she’s, like, eliminating me from our life. I had this picture of a boat, kind of a painting, and I just really liked it. It’s not over the mantel, so she’s put it away somewhere. She doesn’t want it, but she won’t let me have it. That’s what she was like. The cat comes in and sniffs at my ankles and my feet, and I start thinking about what she loved most in the world—”

  “Not the cat.” Nancy was remembering a famous bit of Baltimore lore about a lobbyist who had put his ex’s cat in the microwave.

  “No. What kind of pervert do you think I am? But I look at the cat, twisting around my feet, and when I look at my feet, I see my shoes and I remember—Lorraine loved shoes. So I find a hacksaw in the basement—my hacksaw, by the way, from my toolbox—and I go upstairs and saw the heel off every right shoe in her closet.”

  “Why every right heel?” The detail fascinated Nancy, an insight into Infante, maybe into all men.

  “Because you don’t have to take both to ruin the shoes, you know? And she has, like, ten, twenty pairs of shoes. Half of ’em black, by the way. So when I’m done there’s just like this little pile of—” He gestured, incapable of defining what he had created.

  “Dismembered shoes,” Lenhardt supplied.

  “Yeah. I just left ’em in the middle of the rug.”

  “She ever say anything?” Lenhardt again, the consummate cop, intent on getting the facts while the suspect was feeling voluble and expansive. Nancy was too dumbfounded to comment.

  “Naw. I kept checking the precinct, too, but she never filed a report. So she knew it was me.”

  Nancy finally thought of what she wanted to ask, the question she wanted to ask every mutt, but seldom got a chance. “Did it feel good, sitting on the floor of your old bedroom, sawing shoes?”

  “Yeah. Well, actually, I cut my hand up a little, but I enjoyed every bit of it, absolutely.”

  “You left trace evidence,” Lenhardt said, only half joking. “You could have fucked up your career over something like that.”
/>   “Naw. I had a key, my name was still on the deed. And I bought those fuckin’ shoes, so I was just taking my half.”

  “I wonder,” Nancy said, “what she did with all those leftover shoes. You think there’s a charity that specializes in giving shoes to one-legged women? Like, you might see a woman come hopping at you one day, and she’ll be wearing a pump from your ex-wife’s closet?”

  “I tell you what,” Infante said. “That is the day I take a one-legged woman dancing.”

  Their main courses arrived—cream-rich pasta dishes for the men, penne arrabbiata for Nancy, who had signed up for an online diet service that helped to track one’s daily calorie intake. It had a whole list of what you were supposed to eat in different kinds of restaurants, and it swore by penne arrabbiata in Italian places. She watched wistfully as the waiter grated fresh Parmesan on the others’ dishes, but shook him off with a noble little nod.

  “There are about a million calories in that green stuff,” she said wistfully of the tapenade. Lenhardt and Infante, used to such non sequiturs from her, dug into their food, their chins hanging low enough to catch the steam from the hot bowls of pasta.

  “What about you, Nancy?” Lenhardt asked. “You ever gotten back at anyone?”

  “No one’s ever done anything to me. I mean, not like that.”

  “Really?” For a moment, she thought Lenhardt knew she was lying. He was a good homicide police and being a good police meant knowing how to listen to everything, how to keep secrets and retain them for years, in the hopes they might be useful some day.

  No, she told herself, trying to remember to chew her food with the careful “savoring” bites recommended by her e-Diet program, she was giving her sergeant too much credit. He didn’t know everything. The knowledge felt blasphemous, but good. It was not unlike the way she felt when she realized the priest at her cousin’s wedding was drunk, or that Father Mike couldn’t know if you didn’t tell him absolutely everything at confession. Even her computer wouldn’t know if she was lying, at day’s end, when she dutifully logged her meals. There was only one God and only He—she couldn’t help herself, she still thought of him as He in raised gilt letters—only He really knew what He wanted. Everybody else was just making it up as they went along.

  Friday,

  June 26

  10.

  It was at the Catonsville branch of the Baltimore County Public Library that someone finally thought to call the police. The always busy branch was particularly antic on the third Friday in June, with children selling band candy and a community group gathering signatures on a petition for plantings along the Frederick Road median strip. Inside, the talk—loud, insistent talk, not at all library-like—was about the Fourth of July celebration, and whether there would be fireworks, given last year’s unfortunate incident. (A small fire, no injuries, but still it raised the question of whether the local Elks Lodge should be entrusted with this task again.)

  Miriam Rosen, a patron at Catonsville for more than thirty years, always felt a surge of nostalgia for its more formal past. The reconfigured branch was so crowded, so overwhelmed by all the services that libraries were now expected to provide—not just books and periodicals, but compact discs and videos and DVDs and computers with Internet access—that it seemed more flea market than library. No wonder Starbucks had become so popular, Miriam thought. In Starbucks, a person could find a place to sit.

  She parked Sascha, Jake, and Adrien in the children’s section, reminding Sascha to keep an eye on the baby, as Adrien was still known at age three. Twelve-year-old Sascha rolled her eyes, irritated, but that was as far as her adolescent moodiness had progressed. Miriam’s friends envied her this polite, solemn daughter, but Miriam considered Sascha almost too passive. She wanted her children to be fighters, quick to challenge authority, even hers.

  Now, Jake was a toss-up—at age eight, he was a cipher, polite but secretive, with a con man’s charm, and Miriam sensed that his underwear drawer would yield all manner of contraband as he got older. Then there was Adrien, her late-in-life blessing, her favorite mistake, the Disney World souvenir, just like in the commercial. “You went to Disney World with an eight-year-old and a four-year-old, and still found a way to have sex?” her friends had marveled. Really, Adrien was a bit of a boast all the way around. Everyone in the Rosen family doted on Adrien, yet she was impossible to spoil. She soaked up love the way a napping cat absorbed sunshine. Look at her, sitting Indian-style at Sascha’s feet, paging through a picture book, absolutely contented. She was obedient without being a goody-goody, sweet but not saccharine.

  “Sascha?”

  “What?” The teenager gave the word two syllables, almost three.

  “Keep an eye on Adrien,” Miriam repeated. She headed to the CD section to see what operas were available. The Baltimore Public Library was a bit populist for Miriam’s taste, skewing its collections to what people really wanted, as opposed to what they should want, so the classical music selection was thin. But Miriam never complained, perhaps because she felt a bit guilty about checking out CDs so she could download them onto her computer at home and, with Jake’s help, burn her own CDs. It wasn’t wrong, exactly, but it also wasn’t right—one of those middle-class everyone-does-it crimes, like speeding or rounding down on income taxes.

  Miriam had been pregnant with Adrien when she began playing opera CDs on her endless bouts of chauffeuring the older two, hoping appreciation would come with repeated exposure. When she first left her job at the Homeless Persons Representation Project, she had tried listening to Italian language tapes, but her thoughts ended up drifting. She decided music might require less concentration, permitting her to check in and out. Like a baby in a womb, stereo speakers blasting Mozart at mother’s convex belly, she drove around in her Volvo, willing the music and foreign words to wash over her.

  But so far, the only thing she had learned was how many little bits of opera had entered everyday life, like common foreign phrases so familiar they were no longer regarded as foreign. Miriam recognized melodies from Carmen because they had been incorporated into an episode of Gilligan’s Island, and she could hum Pagliacci’s lament only because it had been used to tout the wonders of Rice Krispies when she was a child. No, it was Adrien who sang along to Madame Butterfly, whose face brightened when a car commercial included that famous strand of notes from Lakmé.

  Oh, to have the spongelike mind of a child again, to soak up knowledge as easily as you popped a Flintstone vitamin. Jake was at that stage where he wanted to know everything, everything, and he used his knowledge with an almost unattractive aggression, correcting Miriam until she got a bit sharp with him. Sascha was beginning to seek forbidden information in secret. Sascha being Sascha, this meant a copy of God’s Little Acre under her bed. Really, the girl was almost quaint in her attempts to rebel.

  Blessed Adrien remained incurious about the world, content that it would reveal its mysteries to her soon enough. Which was fine with Miriam. Childlike wonder was a bit wearying the third time around.

  Her CDs chosen—La Traviata and Manon Lescaut—Miriam checked out the new acquisitions, best-sellers all, and a table of for-sale items, last year’s best-sellers. Back in the children’s section, Sascha was lost in The Red Fairy Tales, the world forgotten as she leaned against the shelf, a piece of hair drawn between her lips. It was a lovely tableau, even with the hair-chewing bit. An incomprehensible teenage habit, yet Miriam had done it, too. Tasted her hair, split the split ends, plucked out one strand at a time, just because she could, because it was her hair to do with as she wished, and because this drove her mother crazy. For a moment, Miriam saw Sascha as a perceptive stranger might, a girl poised between childhood and adolescence. You rushed so hard to grow up, Miriam remembered—until you realized you had no choice. Then you wanted to slow down, draw childhood out, go back to simpler stories and simpler games.

  It took her a second to register the fact that Adrien was nowhere to be seen.

  “Sascha
,” she said, feeling a mild irritation at the girl’s thoughtlessness, “where’s your sister?”

  Sascha looked up, needing a moment to surface from her imaginary world. “Adrien? She’s right here. I mean, she was right here. Maybe she went off with Jake.”

  Perhaps because it was a library, and perhaps because Miriam, too, loved fairy tales, it still didn’t occur to her to feel anything more than impatient.

  But when she found Jake alone at one of the library’s computers—trying to hack his way past the filters, just to see if it could be done—a slight panic began a skipping beat somewhere between Miriam’s stomach and heart. Where had the baby gone? The three Rosens split up, looking everywhere. Adrien was not in the children’s section, or in the rest rooms, or curled up in an aisle’s cozy dead end. Miriam’s hands began to shake, and she had to exert enormous control not to yell at someone, anyone. Sascha and Jake, for their carelessness. The library staff, for running such a chaotic bazaar instead of a hushed, serious place for study. The other families, for daring to be whole.

  The children’s librarian, who knew the Rosens well, made an announcement on the seldom-used PA system. If anyone sees a little girl with long curly hair in a green T-shirt and pink plaid pants, please bring her to the Information Desk. Yet the amplified voice could barely be heard over the buzz of the library. Ten minutes passed, fifteen, twenty. Miriam, hands shaking ever harder, insisted on calling the police despite the staff’s assurances that this happened every now and then, and the children always—always—turned up.