Every Secret Thing

by Laura Lippman

  “How is it,” he said at last, “that you go to Towson High, but your parents live over in Southwest Baltimore?”

  She thought of the answer her doctor had told her she could use, when asked about her past. “It’s really complicated.”

  “Oh, yeah, I know how that works. Use a fake address to get into a better school. I went to Calvert Hall myself.” He seemed pleased with himself, but it meant nothing to Ronnie.

  They had been driving west—she could tell by the sun—and the landscape of houses had been shifting constantly, from very rich to very poor. They had passed a hospital, and the racetrack. She was keeping tabs because you never knew, Victoria said, where you might get put out. Now it looked like the neighborhood where Ronnie had grown up, except everyone on the street was black.

  The driver—he had said his name was Bill—took several quick turns and they ended up on a narrow road along a stream. The car slowed, and Ronnie made sure she was holding the door handle, but there was no shoulder and he kept going. He passed through a neighborhood where all the houses were white, and Ronnie realized she knew it, that she was close to home. The houses began to peter out, and they were in a dense corridor of trees that were just beginning to bud. Somehow, the stream was now on the left side. When had they crossed it? Ronnie had not noticed a bridge. And then there was a barrier, a big sign saying the road was closed until further notice.

  “Well, I’ll be,” her driver said. “I forgot they closed this off.”

  But he didn’t try to turn around, just put the car in park and reached across her to the glove compartment, opening it and taking out a small bottle of clear liquid. If it had not been for the black bag on her lap, he would have rubbed his arm against Ronnie’s breasts. Instead, he had to settle for brushing against nylon.

  “This is Leakin Park,” she said. “My house is just on the other side of these hills.”

  “Right. But we’ll have to backtrack, go the long way around via Forest Park.”

  “Why is the road closed?”

  His hand was in his lap, the tip of his tongue protruded between his lips, but he was otherwise the same shiny-faced man who had picked her up, the man named Bill who had gone to Calvert Hall, whose cousin had gone to Towson High.

  “They’re building some kind of walkway. They call it a nature trail, but Jungle Land would be more like it. Or Baltimore Safari. Walk through Leakin Park, see if you come out alive. They could make one of those reality TV shows about it.”

  “Why is it unsafe?” Ronnie had played along the edges of Leakin Park when she was as little as seven, and ventured farther and farther inside as she got older. Of course, she didn’t have permission, but she had never felt scared there.

  “Because that’s a bad neighborhood up on that hill.”

  “Oh. I thought it was because—well, I heard something really bad happened here once.”

  “Like a ghost story? You want to tell me a ghost story, honey? Come sit on my lap and tell me your story. Tell Uncle Bill your story.”

  She hugged her bag tighter to her chest.

  “Show me your titties, Alice.” For that was the name she had given him, when he asked about high school. Alice Manning. Alice Manning, Alice Manning, Alice Manning. It was the first time Ronnie had to make up a name for herself, and she automatically said, Alice Manning.

  “Show me your titties, and I’ll take you the rest of the way home. Just pull up your shirt, show me those pretty little things. I won’t touch ’em. I promise I won’t touch ’em.”

  “I’m fourteen,” she said.

  “Oh, I don’t think so. You walk like you’ve been fucked a time or two. You’ve been a bad girl, haven’t you? Tell Uncle Bill. Tell Uncle Bill what you let the boys do to you.”

  His hand was beginning to move in his lap, but his voice was still dreamy and pleasant.

  “You’re a bad, bad girl,” he crooned. “I know all about you.”

  “I’m not.”

  Her voice was shrill and hard, the angriest voice she had allowed herself in quite some time. She tried to rein it in. “But I know someone who was—who is. I’ll tell you what she did.”

  “Tell Uncle Bill, baby. Tell Uncle Bill.”

  “There were two little girls—”

  “Oh, that’s a good story, Alice.”

  “And they found a baby. A baby whose mother didn’t love her, who left her all alone on the front porch. They took her away from her mother and they made a…safe place for her. But the baby was sick, all along, she was going to die anyway. And the girls—well, one of the girls—got scared and said they had to take her back. But the other girl said no, that they couldn’t, that they had to kill the baby because no one would believe them anyway.”

  His hand had stopped moving.

  “It really happened,” Ronnie said. “Right here, seven years ago. I know the girls who did it. They went to my school.”

  “I thought you went to Towson.”

  “My school before,” Ronnie said, staring him straight in the eye. “Middle school.”

  The man’s face was now gray-white instead of red, although still quite sweaty. He wiped his hand on his pants leg, turned the key in the ignition, and said to Ronnie: “Tell me again where you live.”

  And so she had arrived home on the hottest March day in history, thirty dollars richer, and she hadn’t had to do a thing. She had sat on her bed, thinking about her choices. She could have gone downstairs and seen what was in the refrigerator. She could have turned on the television in her parents’ room, flopped across the bed on her stomach. She could have taken a walk, headed down the street to the convenience store. The store stood where her old street and her new street met, a hinge between the old life and the new.

  Instead, she had decided to take the gift-wrapped box from her bag and open it. The square box had a sticker on it: Port Discovery: The Kids’ Museum. Ronnie didn’t remember such a place from when she was a kid. Back then, all the museums had been boring adult ones, full of vases.

  The box yielded, from layers and layers of spun cotton, a collection of key rings, all with little toys attached. A tiny replica of the old Operation game, the board from Life, the bald man with magnetic hair to be arranged and rearranged. The final ring held a miniature Etch-a-Sketch. The counselor had painstakingly written on its tiny surface: “Good luck, Ronnie.”

  She had also enclosed a note: “I wasn’t sure which one you’d like best, so I got you all of them.” Nice, she was nice. But why a key ring? It seemed a weird gift. And then Ronnie had understood. For the first time in seven years, she would have keys. She would open her own doors, and close them behind her.

  It was April now, and that Etch-a-Sketch, long wiped clean, was in her hand, clenched so her keys—just two, to the front door lock and the dead bolt—dug into her palms. She was in the old block, walking past the Mannings’ house. She could not risk slowing down, or even staring openly. It was early, anyway, and Helen often slept until noon on Saturdays. But if their paths did cross, if she saw Ronnie and said hello, then Ronnie could ask, as if it had just occurred to her, as if she had not thought about it almost every day for the last seven years: Do you remember the honeysuckle?

  She knew Helen would.

  7.

  Wagner’s Tavern had become the county homicide detectives’ bar of choice by way of becoming a police scene. An SUV crammed with five screaming teenagers took the curve outside the bar at 100 miles per hour one night before Christmas. At least, that was the speed estimate after the fact, when traffic investigators began to crawl around the three steaming pieces of the bright-red Isuzu Rodeo that had come to rest inside Wagner’s, a few feet short of the pool table. The top speed could have been 90 or 95, but 100 made for a nice round number, and the television reporters always used the biggest numbers they could get away with, whether it was speed or snowfall.

  “Except in the case of windchill,” said Lenhardt, interrupting his own story. “Then they use the lowest number. You kno
w—the temperature will be thirty-seven degrees today, but it will feel like twenty below! Tune back in at five and it may be thirty below! Our twenty-four-hour Doppler Radar Storm Center Hoo-Haw guarantees the most dire weather forecast in Baltimore, or your money back.”

  Lenhardt had happened to be on his way home the night of the crash when he saw patrol cars and uniforms swarming. The human toll was miraculously light—the only Shock Trauma transports were two of the kids in the car, and as Lenhardt said later in his Lenhardt way, “Hard to get choked up about that.” The redheaded barmaid had a broken leg, and a couple of people caught broken glass, some of it flung from the ornaments on the demolished Christmas tree, which was the first thing the Isuzu hit after coming through the wall.

  But the bar had lived to tell the tale, and the only visible change was the guardrail on the curve. On late nights, Lenhardt could be found at the curve of the reconstituted bar, or sitting at a plastic-covered table, buying rounds for his detectives.

  “So that’s why you come here.” It was Nancy’s first time at Wagner’s, because she usually said no and hurried home to Andy. But she needed to be one of the guys tonight, even at the risk of pissing Andy off.

  “What?” Lenhardt said, playing dumb, no small play for him. “You trying to imply something about my choice of drinking establishments?”

  “You picked this as your hangout because you figure it can’t happen again. Which is really superstitious.”

  “I’d call it playing the odds.”

  “Only the odds haven’t changed because the curve hasn’t changed.”

  “Huh?” Infante said, truly lost. But Lenhardt grinned knowingly.

  “It’s not like there’s a standard probability for a bar getting hit by a car,” Nancy said. “A bar on this kind of curve is going to get hit more often than a bar that’s not on the curve, guardrail or no.”

  “Standard probability.” The sergeant turned to the other detective. “Listen to that, Infante. We’re wasting our time here. Let’s go to Atlantic City, let Miss Nancy demonstrate her knowledge of standard probability at the blackjack tables.”

  “So why do you come here?” Nancy was already bored with the topic, but she had to stick to her guns, show Lenhardt she had the stamina to stay with an argument.

  “I come here because the beer is cheap, they’ll open the kitchen for a public servant working late, and it’s on the way home. Don’t overanalyze things, Nancy. How many times I gotta tell you that?”

  Infante laughed in his hand, and Nancy could feel a blush spreading across her face like a stain. Sometimes she hated being so fair, so blond.

  Lenhardt took pity on her. “You got your own stuff to work on, Infante.”

  She bit into a popper, the closest thing to a vegetable she had eaten in three days. “Hey, how come he’s Infante and I’m always Nancy, or Miss Nancy?”

  “Fer Chri—” But Lenhardt wouldn’t even take the lord’s name in front of Nancy, so he ended up saying nothing more than “Fer cry.” Most times he didn’t even get halfway into the word, but the day had taken its toll.

  “You’re not going to get all feminist on me, are you?” Lenhardt asked now. “I mean, he”—he stopped himself again—“heck, you want me to call you Porter, I’ll call you Porter. I’ll even try to call you that mouthful of consonants you were born with—Padrewski, Portrotsky. But cra”—another deft catch—“c’mon, it’s just, it’s just a way of talking, Nancy. I mean Potter. I mean Porterchinski.”

  “Potrcurzski. That’s okay, sergeant. I got a special name for you, too.”

  “Yeah? What?”

  “The Double-L.”

  “How you get a double l out of Harold Lenhardt?”

  “It’s not for Lenhardt.” Nancy grinned. “For Living Legend. Because that’s what everyone tells me I’m working for. My uncles, Andy—they remind me at least once a week that my sergeant is a genuine goddamn livin’ legend.”

  She thought this would make him laugh, but Lenhardt just shook his head. “There are no living legends, Nancy. Only dead ones.”

  They had cleared the New York Fried Chicken case that evening. Now it was the prosecutor’s to lose. It had taken twelve hours of interviews with four different kids, but when the day was done, they had booked all four, three on homicide, one on a lesser charge, because that was the deal he had struck. In some ways, Nancy thought the deal-maker the finkiest of the four, but wasn’t that the way? They were always the ones who turned.

  Lenhardt misread her mournful expression, seemed to think she was feeling sorry for herself. “You’ll be a good murder police.”

  Good, but not great, Nancy thought, then wondered why she was so defensive. No one had criticized her over the past four days, or suggested she was inadequate in any way. She had been praised for some of her work. Yet she felt rebuked, stupid, exposed. A kid had seen through her. A jumpy killer, with the impulse control of a mouse on Ritalin, had gotten to her.

  Her Nokia cell phone chirped. Andy typed his good night:

  LONG DAY. GOING TO BED.

  Even his text message sounded angry. Beneath the table, Nancy typed back:

  SUIT YOURSELF.

  Then she wanted to take it back, but she couldn’t.

  They had been together since high school, one way or another, but it was only lately they had fallen into the habit of sniping at each other. Her mother said it would pass, and her mother had a thirty-five-year marriage on which to stake her expertise. But what did her mother know about twelve-hour days that left you feeling at once victorious and ashamed? You couldn’t go straight home after a day like that. If anyone could understand, it should be Andy, who had been a police and was now working for the feds while attending law school at night.

  “I feel like we know what happened,” Nancy said, “but not why. It was supposed to be a robbery, with a gun.”

  “Why isn’t our problem,” Lenhardt said. “Forget about it.”

  She couldn’t. “According to the inside kid they were going to wear masks, put the manager and their accomplice in the freezer to throw detectives off. The gun was supposed to be for show, to get the money.”

  The inside kid, the coworker, had been almost grateful to be found. After all, he knew better than anyone the potential vindictiveness of his buddies, all former employees at New York Fried Chicken. The inside kid had pled to a lesser charge of manslaughter, but his main crime in Nancy’s opinion was being dumb enough to think that if you unlock the door at a Route 40 chicken shack and admit three unmasked guys with a gun, they’re going to be content to take the money and depart, doffing their caps as they go. Doffing their caps was another Lenhardtism, of course: “Tally-ho, good day, thank you for these tens and twenties, and may I have some of the Cajun extra-crispy to go? It ain’t Cary Grant on the Riviera, Nancy. If it were, robbery would be working it. People don’t kill people sometimes, we’re out of work.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Nancy said. She suspected that Lenhardt wanted to let it go, put the day behind him, but she couldn’t. She had to learn. It had been so easy to catch them, so hard to break them down. They had an insolence that left her breathless. Her Polish grandfather had escaped from Europe with nothing but the clothes on his back, survived the sinking of an ocean liner, and refused the easy names pressed on him when he arrived at the Port of Baltimore in 1916. Josef Potrcurzski had carried his own knife, and later a gun, guarding his block like a sheriff in the Old West. Yet even he would have been terrified by this trio.

  “The killing was the point,” Lenhardt said. “More than the money, which would have lasted maybe forty-eight hours, and that’s if they got some financial planner from Merrill Lynch to help them invest it. They didn’t kill someone in a robbery. They had a robbery so they could kill someone.”

  “So why bring a gun,” Nancy said, “and use one of the kitchen knives?”

  Lenhardt pressed his palms into his eyes and rubbed, hard, the way the redheaded barmaid had twisted Nancy’s limed-up margarita
glass when Nancy asked for extra salt.

  “I don’t know, Miss Nancy. I just don’t know. You found the casing in the parking lot. Maybe the kid with the gun fired it and was scared by the noise. Maybe they shot and missed, what with the vic swinging that knife around, assuming they were telling the truth about that. Poor bastard died defending the honor of New York Fried Chicken.”

  “Okay, so they wanted to kill someone. But why someone they’d be connected to so easily?”

  “They’re not thinking this through, Nancy. They don’t know from standard probability.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Maybe they killed him because he was their boss once. Because he told them to clean out the fryer, and put those napkins out, and make sure the tables are wiped down. Because he enforced the hair net rule. They killed him—” Lenhardt paused. He knew how to tell a story, how to get his audience hanging on his every word. “Because he cared, because he thought it mattered that the New York Fried Chicken on Route 40 had clean bathrooms and fresh oil and low absenteeism. The fast-food true believer met the West Side Existentialist Club, and the existentialists won.”

  Lenhardt rolled his eyes—Did I say that?—and Infante laughed, repeating existentialist in a slightly drunken slur, as if it were funny, maybe even a little dirty.

  “You know, five miles east, and it’s not even a county case,” Infante said. “I don’t think it’s where the crime occurs that should establish jurisdiction. I think it’s where the mope lives. Their bum, their tax dollars, their detectives.”

  “Shit, you play by those rules, the only thing we’re catching is domestics in Dundalk. Besides, we represent the victims, remember? We work for the citizens of Baltimore County.”

  Lenhardt’s mood had been rising and falling since they arrived at Wagner’s. He always plunged after the initial high of getting the work done. “Homicide hypoglycemia,” he called it. Nancy experienced the same thing, if to a lesser degree. It felt good to get the clearance, but the process exacted a price. She found that she listened to the confessions the way she watched a scary movie, basically wishing it all undone, urging the actors to do the things that would make the movie end in five uneventful minutes. Don’t open that door. Don’t confide in that man. Don’t pick up that phone.