The female detective’s parting glance was pitying. Helen didn’t mind. Pity was the least she deserved.
The afternoon sun created a powerful glare on the parking lot at Westview, so Ronnie did not notice the man and woman walking purposefully toward the bagel shop until they were inside. But once she could see them, she knew they were officials of some sort, on business. Health Department? Not on a Saturday, and not with guns on their belts. Mall security? Those guys wore uniforms and didn’t come in pairs. No, these were cops.
“Ronnie Fuller?” the woman asked. She looked familiar for some reason, yet Ronnie didn’t know her. Maybe she just had one of those faces.
“Yeah.”
“We need to talk to you, if we could.”
Ronnie was aware of Clarice listening, although her back was turned. “I’m five minutes from taking a break. Could this wait until then? I’ll meet you outside.”
“Sure.”
The police officers didn’t go outside. They grabbed a pair of sodas from the case and seated themselves at one of the round tables, so they were facing Ronnie, watching her. They talked in low, casual voices, but one of them was always looking at her, sometimes both. And with Clarice now stealing looks at her, too, Ronnie couldn’t help feeling nervous. It had been a long time since so many people had looked at her at once.
The five minutes passed slowly, a fact that Ronnie registered as odd. Given that she didn’t want to talk to them, the minute hand on the big Coca-Cola clock should have shot forward five spaces in a matter of seconds. But the time dragged. She waited on a few more customers, teenage girls. Wait, she was a teenage girl, too. She forgot that sometimes. She felt like she had more in common with Clarice than she did with the girls on the other side of the counter. They compared calluses, the ones they got from standing, and talked about how their legs ached at the end of the day.
“You take your break,” Clarice said at last. “I can watch the cash register, slow as it is.”
She seemed to be trying to say something else with her kind brown eyes, but what? Was she disappointed in Ronnie because police officers had come to talk to her? She would be even more disappointed if she knew about Ronnie’s past. Would she let Ronnie continue to work here? Probably not. Even if she did, she wouldn’t be Ronnie’s friend anymore. She would treat her with the cold, polite reserve that she used on the customers. When the teenage girls had stood in front of the counter, giggling and changing their orders back and forth, Ronnie could feel Clarice’s dislike for them. White, silly, self-important, foolish. She would die if Clarice treated her that way.
But if Clarice found out about Olivia Barnes, she would think Ronnie was one of those white people who hated black people. That had been another one of the lies told by Maddy’s mom. Of all the things that Ronnie had done, or been accused of doing, this detail remained so sharp. She had said a horrible word, the one word you could never take back. That was why most people believed Alice over her, when it came down to it. Alice had never said the horrible word.
“I just have to go in the back,” she told the detectives, “and hang up my apron. We’re not allowed to wear them on break. It has something to do with the Health Department.”
Clarice probably gave her an odd look at that, knowing it for the lie it was, but Ronnie didn’t care. She pushed her way back into the kitchen, where O’lene was studying the ovens.
“Hey, Ronnie,” she said, “do I have to put in a new batch of anything? Or can we make it to three P.M. with what we’ve got?”
“What we’ve got,” Ronnie said tonelessly. She folded her apron, put it on top of one of the boxes, and opened the back door, the one used for delivery.
“Hey, what the—”
But she was already out of O’lene’s earshot, running blindly toward Route 40. She didn’t know where she was going to go, or what she was going to do. The only thing she knew was that when they came for you, their minds were already made up. So you might as well run, and be free for a few hours longer. You might as well run.
* * *
It was just before 6 P.M. when Alice let herself into the house, blinking violently. Helen didn’t approve of air-conditioning—that was her exact word, approve, as if it were an idea, or a habit—and she kept the house dark and shuttered in the summertime. It worked, actually, and the living room was surprisingly pleasant. But the abrupt change in light was hard on Alice’s eyes. She swore she could actually feel her irises opening, desperate to find enough light to focus in the dim room.
Then she saw Helen, sitting in an old easy chair unearthed from the Salvation Army and covered in a bright flowery print that Helen had raved about. Marimekko, Alice recalled. “I had dresses made out of this when I was your age,” Helen had said. Now she sat in the chair, still in her robe, although it was almost dinnertime.
“Some people came looking for you.”
“People?”
“Police detectives.”
“What did they want?”
“They want to talk to you.”
“Why?”
“They wouldn’t tell me. Why don’t you?”
“How can I tell you what I don’t know?”
“Are you sure you don’t know?”
“Of course I’m sure.” Alice lowered herself onto the sofa, removed her shoes, and examined the soles of her feet. She had been using a special cream on her heels, but they were still cracked and split from her rambling, as she had come to think of her long walks. She wished she knew someone other than Helen who might ask what she was up to these days, because she would like to use that answer: “Me? Oh, I’ve been rambling.” It sounded romantic.
“Alice—I can’t go through this again.”
“What?”
“You know.”
Alice did, but she wanted Helen to say it. “I don’t have a clue what you mean.”
“Alice, baby.”
“Don’t call me baby.”
“You are my baby. My one and only. You will always be my baby.”
“Right,” Alice said, with a short bark of a laugh. “Right.”
“Why would the police want to talk to you?”
“I told you, I don’t know. But I guess there’s only one way to find out.”
She held out her hand, weary in a way she hadn’t been coming up the walk. Then she had felt energized, despite her long day of rambling. She had been thinking about their Saturday night pizza, which Helen insisted on ordering from one of those gourmet places that served pizza with things like shrimp and chicken fajitas and even stuffed grape leaves. Alice would have been happy with a plain cheese from Domino’s. Instead, she usually ordered something called a “margherita,” which was just tomato-and-cheese in disguise. So Helen. She kept giving ordinary things the most extraordinary names. A tomato-and-cheese pizza became margherita, a piece of fabric was Marimekko.
Helen stared, perplexed, at Alice’s outstretched hand.
“They gave you a card, right? Well, give it to me.”
Helen fished it out of her robe pocket and handed it over. Nancy Porter. Baltimore County Homicide.
“Are you going to call?” Helen asked, as if Alice were the adult, the one who got to make decisions.
“After dinner. It’s pizza night, remember?”
“They might have gone home by then.”
“Then I’ll talk to them Monday.”
“But—”
“If it’s important to them, they’ll come back,” Alice said, going into the kitchen to grab the carryout menu from beneath the refrigerator magnet shaped like Glinda the Good. Even though she knew the menu and the phone number by heart, she liked to study it before ordering, just in case she decided to try something other than her usual. “They always come back.”
19.
Nancy and Infante managed to make good use of their time that afternoon—canvassing the mall’s shops, looking for anyone who might have sold scissors or a new outfit for a toddler. The people they interviewed were all helpfu
l, too, which wasn’t always the case. At least they wished to be helpful. A missing girl generated that kind of response. But no one really knew anything, and ignorance took longer to process and assess than pertinent information.
Still, Nancy and Infante felt almost at peace with the day they had put in. Almost. Flight was tantamount to confession. Ronnie Fuller was hiding something, and she would tell them what it was when they found her. And they would find her. A teenage girl who worked in a bagel shop and lived with her parents could hide only so long. Ronnie didn’t even know how to drive—Nancy and Infante had learned that from her mother, a woman who wasn’t so much pale as gray and lumpy, like a doll left outside too long. Ronnie didn’t have a boyfriend, or any friends, period. That was how her mother put it, sitting at her kitchen table, head bowed in shame: “No boyfriend. No friends. Period.”
But what if time mattered? Even if their client was a corpse—which was Lenhardt’s private slogan for their department, “Your corpse is our client”—time was important. But if the girl was being kept alive, as Olivia Barnes had been, then time was an enemy and an ally, a tease and a cheat. Every minute that passed gave them hope. Every minute filled them with despair.
“And you know what would be the worst possible outcome?” Nancy said, speaking as if she had been airing her thoughts out loud all along.
Infante caught up with her, a ballroom dancer used to following a partner’s improvisations.
“If she was alive for a while and now isn’t,” he said. “I mean, if she’s going to be dead, it’s better if she’s been dead all along, since early Friday night. Otherwise, it’s lose-lose. People will be second-guessing us, and whatever we did will be the wrong thing in hindsight. Solving the case won’t matter.”
“It won’t matter as much.”
“I gotta say, I think she’s dead.”
“I don’t know what to think. It doesn’t make sense. Cutting the hair and changing the clothes suggests abduction for a purpose. But then there’s this T-shirt with blood on it.”
“Only not her blood.”
“It just doesn’t sound like what they would do. The girls, I mean. It’s nothing like what they did last time.”
“That’s right—you know them, don’t you?” Infante’s tone was supercasual, the kind of tone he might use in an interrogation. Nancy wondered what Lenhardt had confided in Infante last night, in the men’s room. She was told he wanted them to work the case because Jeffries was up, and Jeffries wasn’t much good. A year from his twenty-and-out, he was like a piece of furniture that had gone out of style and they just kept shifting him around the room, too sentimental to call bulk trash to haul him away. So it was credible that Lenhardt didn’t want him to work this case. Credible, plausible—but Lenhardt would be the first to remind Nancy that those words didn’t guarantee truth, just a reasonable facsimile. Credible stories were the kind they picked apart every day.
“I wouldn’t say I know them,” Nancy said, choosing her words carefully. She had never spoken to Ronnie Fuller before today, and Alice Manning was still nothing more than a face she had glimpsed at the courthouse long ago. It was their handiwork that had gotten tangled up in her life, the evidence of their venality, not the girls themselves. “I had a…minor connection to the Olivia Barnes case. So, some coincidence, huh, me working this case?”
She was giving Infante a chance to contradict her, to tell her if Lenhardt had moved them up in the rotation for any specific reason.
“I don’t know. You work in law enforcement long enough, you’re going to see certain people more than once, even if you change jurisdictions. Like Lenhardt and the Epstein case.”
“Yeah.” Nancy didn’t have a clue what Infante was referencing. She didn’t mind asking questions when she didn’t know something, but she had also figured out that much would be revealed from context, if a person was patient. The Epstein case. She filed it away, knowing the story would emerge eventually.
They were on the Beltway, completing the long, sweeping loop around the city, making their way back to headquarters. The vast, inefficient expanse that was the county still amazed Nancy. Driving, just driving, accounted for a third of her overtime every year. Some people said the county was shaped like a wrench, and Baltimore was the lug. Nancy thought it looked like a piece of snot hanging from the Pennsylvania line. “So much space, so little crime,” Lenhardt said, his voice almost wistful for the felony-dense precincts of the city. It had to be an easier place to hide. But then, Ronnie didn’t know the county either. She was a city girl, and the only place she had known for the last seven years was whatever juvenile facility had held her.
All Ronnie had was a five-minute head start on them, but so far it had proved to be enough. That’s how long they had needed to conclude that she wasn’t going to emerge from the kitchen, wasn’t hanging up her apron, or going to the bathroom, or combing her hair. O’lene, the girl who worked the ovens, just shrugged her skinny shoulders and said she hadn’t noticed anything. The manager, Clarice something, had been as unhelpful as she dared, her loathing for Nancy and Infante palpable. A middle-aged black woman living and working in Southwest Baltimore was not likely to be a fan of the police under any circumstances. But Clarice’s antipathy had been pronounced, personal. Nancy had the impression that the woman didn’t want anyone to talk to Ronnie until she had a chance to question her.
Yet it was Clarice who, unwittingly, told them what they needed to know: On Friday, the day Brittany Little had disappeared, Ronnie had left the store at 3:30 P.M. Clarice had told them this as a way of praising Ronnie’s constancy, her excellent work habits, and they had nodded, as if they agreed. But all it meant was that Ronnie was off on her own, a few hundred yards from Value City, only a few hours before Brittany was reported missing.
“Brittany Little’s mother called the police about six-thirty,” Infante said. “That gives Ronnie Fuller three hours to walk across the parking lot, buy whatever she needed, then pick out her victim.”
“But see, that doesn’t make sense if the whole point is that the girl looks like the younger sister of the baby Ronnie killed seven years ago. If Cynthia Barnes is right, it’s a case of mistaken identity. But Ronnie knows what Cynthia and her husband look like. If she saw Brittany with her real mother, she wouldn’t make that mistake.”
“Maybe she thought the woman was a baby-sitter or something. I will say Maveen Little was pretty convincing, stupid as she is. Her story stayed constant, late as we talked to her last night. Hey, you ever date a black man?”
Now it was Nancy’s turn to follow Infante’s twist of thought. “Just because her boyfriend is black, and her baby’s father is black, doesn’t mean she dates only black men.”
“I bet she does. It’s a type, you see it all the time, especially in South and Southwest Baltimore. What’s that about, anyway—white girls who date only black guys? I never got that.”
“I don’t know.”
“So did you ever date a black guy?”
“I’ve been with Andy since I was in high school. I barely dated anyone.”
“Yeah, but would you? Like…Denzel Washington. Would you go out with him? I mean, not him, because hell, I’d probably bend over for him, rich and good-looking as he is. But say there’s a guy in, I don’t know, Auto Theft, and he’s attractive and nice and treats women right. Would you go out with him?”
“I’m married, remember?”
“But if you weren’t. C’mon, play with me, Nancy. Would you date a black guy under those circumstances?”
“Yeah, sure.” Actually, she didn’t think she would, although she would never rule it out. Her taste happened to run to blond men, men like the Polish boys she had known all her life, a Daddy thing.
“I’d love to go out with a black girl.”
“I thought your thing was redheads.”
“I’m—what’s the word—inclusive.”
Nancy had to laugh at that. Infante’s candor about his weaknesses made them easy to f
orgive. He didn’t pretend to be anyone other than who he was.
She wished she could say as much about herself.
The sun was setting when they got back to the office. The longest day of the year had come and gone, but the days were still plenty long, and a case like this offered no natural stopping point. Sometimes, going home was a form of discipline, a way of admitting you were only human, needing sleep and food. But who would leave work, much less sleep, when a girl was missing? They had put out the Amber Alert this morning, and Lenhardt had told them the commissioner wanted to launch a search if they didn’t have any solid leads in twenty-four hours. The only question was where would they search, how could they establish a grid? In the area around the mall, the area around Ronnie Fuller’s home?
Or the site of the old crime, the place where Olivia Barnes had been killed.
Leakin Park, taunted a voice in Nancy’s head, a voice she had been shouting down all day. You’re going to have to go back to Leakin Park. It was a cool, detached voice, one she had begun hearing more and more as she advanced in the department. She thought of the voice as an older, wiser self, visiting from the future. Sometimes she wished the voice would tell her everything it knew. Other times she just wanted it to go away, leave her alone.
Besides, the Chicken Man’s house surely was long gone. It had been decrepit seven years ago, and the trail project should have meant its demise. Or the Barnes family had made sure that the shack was bulldozed. That sad, broken-down place wasn’t the kind of memorial anyone wanted for their child.
Infante’s pager went off in the parking lot and he looked down. “Weird,” he said. “It’s coming from inside the building, from the switchboard.”
They walked into the lobby and the desk attendant looked up, not at all surprised by the synchronicity that brought the two detectives into view seconds after they had been paged.
Every Secret Thing Page 17