Nancy turned the box around and then over. It was then that she saw the piece of masking tape inscribed with the proud, round shapes of a child who has just learned to write in cursive: Alice Manning. The name had no meaning to her then, but she could imagine a teacher telling Alice Manning, as teachers had once told Nancy, that her A should look like a sailboat going backward, that her M should be tall and strong, like an iron fence. A teacher would be proud of the girl who wrote these letters.
Nancy closed the lid, so the toy would be as she found it, and backed out of the house. Cyrus was already running upstream, splashing through the brackish water. He wanted to get there first, she assumed, to hog the credit for her hunch. But she misjudged him, it turned out. He just wanted to get away, to put as much distance as he could between himself and the dead child.
Nancy was thinking about Cyrus as she made her way along that same stream in the dark, her flashlight picking out a path. Again, the trip was longer than she remembered. Again, she rounded bend after bend, expecting to see the house, only to find it wasn’t there. What if it was gone? How stupid would she feel, how silly?
The last time she had seen Cyrus was two years ago in Circuit City, when she and Andy were shopping for a new television set. He called himself a sales associate and he said the money was great, better than he had ever imagined. He was good at sales, much to his surprise. “Still a cop?” he asked Nancy. “Yeah,” Nancy said, “but out in the county.” He nodded, and Nancy detected a world of assumptions in that nod. Everyone thought they knew why she left the city. Everyone was wrong. And even if she told them, they wouldn’t believe her. She wouldn’t believe it either. Who would ever guess that good luck could be the worst thing that ever happened to a person? Mistakes— everyone made mistakes, and therefore could forgive them. Nancy had been derailed by her own freaky luck.
The shack had slumped over time, sagging as surely as Cyrus’s shoulders had. Nancy hesitated at the foot of the hill, just as she had once before. Perhaps her young self had understood, in its dim subconscious way, the consequences of walking up the hill, of finding what she found. Would there be newer, harsher consequences if she walked up to that threshold again? But she had come all this way in the dark. She had to look.
Her flashlight found Ronnie Fuller in a corner of the cabin, knees drawn to her chest, rocking rhythmically. She squinted when the beam from Nancy’s flashlight washed over her face, but said nothing. Nancy flicked the light around. No one else was there, alive or dead. There was nothing there at all. Just Ronnie, rocking back and forth, humming a little tune to herself.
23.
“She in there?” Infante asked when he returned to the tenth floor about 2 A.M., summoned by Nancy’s page.
“Yeah,” she said, drinking a cup of coffee she had just brewed, although she didn’t really need the caffeine. Adrenaline was more than doing its job, keeping her alert and sharp, impervious to sleep.
“You talk to her?”
“We chatted, about nothing in particular. But once I got her in there and went down to the machines to get her a soda and a candy bar, she fell asleep.”
“And you let her?”
Nancy knew Infante didn’t mean his question to land like a rebuke, but it did.
“It’s weird, I couldn’t wake her for anything,” she said, trying not to sound defensive. “I shook her arm, I all but yelled in her ear, but she kept sleeping all along.”
“Sleeping all along,” Infante repeated. “Well, then, let her sleep. And you, too. Squeeze in a catnap, and I’ll keep watch in case she wakes up, and then I’ll jump in there. Hey, how’d you know where to find her?”
“Hunch.” An honest answer, Nancy told herself, just not a complete one. She would tell Infante the whole story in detail one day. One day, not tonight. Tonight, she found herself saying what she had said to Cyrus, her classmate, all those years ago. “I remembered this shack in Leakin Park from when my family used to go to the Millrace for crabs.”
“No sign of the missing girl, though.”
“None.”
“Did she try to run again?”
“No. She seemed almost happy to be found. It’s a scary place at night. It scared me.”
The girl had, in fact, lifted her arms to Nancy, taking on a supplicant’s posture that confused her. Then she realized: Ronnie was holding her arms out for handcuffs.
Nancy had not given any thought to the challenge of leading someone back along the dark, bumpy trail, much less a person in cuffs. She had assumed she was on a wild-goose chase for Brittany Little’s body. Did she have to use the cuffs? The fact that Ronnie was so ready to wear handcuffs should be proof enough that the girl wasn’t even thinking about running again. She had decided, after a fashion, to turn herself in.
But what if she did run, once back to the street? What if, once free of the dark, inexact shapes here in the woods, she pushed Nancy down, took her gun, or stole her car? There’s good Ronnie and bad Ronnie, Alice had warned. And bad Ronnie will do anything, and then good Ronnie can’t believe she did it. How could Nancy ever explain herself to Lenhardt, or the lieutenant, and all the way up the rest of the chain of command? She hated thinking things through this way, anticipating how she might fail and how others might react. But second-guessing herself was second nature to Nancy.
She had helped Ronnie Fuller stumble down the hill, her arms cuffed behind her, silent until they reached Nancy’s car, a Toyota RAV-4.
“Is this a cop car?”
“It’s my personal car.”
“Oh.” And then, as if it were a social situation and she had to say something, anything: “It’s nice.”
“Thanks.”
Ronnie didn’t volunteer anything more, allowing Nancy to buckle her into the backseat as if she were a child being put in a car seat. Nancy adjusted the seat belt so Ronnie could lean forward, making space for her bound wrists.
“Where’s Brittany Little?” Nancy asked once they were on their way.
“Who?”
“The girl taken from Value City.”
“A girl was taken from Value City?”
“C’mon Ronnie. If you didn’t know a girl was missing, why did you run away?”
“Because you’re a cop, right? You’re the cop.”
“I’m a detective who’s investigating the disappearance of a three-year-old girl not even two hundred yards from where you work.”
“No, I mean, you’re the cop.” She waited for Nancy’s confirmation. “The one who found the baby. I didn’t recognize you at first, but when I thought about it, I knew where I had seen you before. You don’t look much different. You wear your hair the same way.”
“How did you know what I look like?”
“My mom…” The word made Ronnie lose her train of thought. “Well, you were on television, right? Getting some kind of reward? And in the newspaper. Even later, after I was away, I saw you on television a couple of times. Didn’t I?”
“Yeah,” Nancy confessed. “Yeah.”
They rode in silence for a while. Without the opportunity to make eye contact, Nancy didn’t want to go too far into the subject of Brittany. But she could ask about Olivia.
“Why pudding, Ronnie?”
“What?”
“You fed Olivia Barnes pudding. We found these little pop-top single servings of pudding all over the shack. But if you bought pudding, you could have bought baby food. Didn’t you know you should give her baby food?”
“We didn’t buy anything. I took those puddings from my house.”
“Oh.” Nancy thought about this. Until asked and answered, the question had seemed portentous. All these years, she had been thinking about the pudding cups, and the explanation was so simple. Were all the answers as simple as this? If so, she might as well jump ahead, ask the only thing that mattered.
“Why did you kill her?”
“The baby, you mean?” Would Ronnie have to ask for clarification if she hadn’t killed more than one child? The
simple fact of syntax filled Nancy with hope and dread, for if she was reading it right, Ronnie was all but confessing and Brittany Little was already dead.
“Yes. Olivia Barnes. The baby.”
Nancy could see Ronnie’s shape in the rearview mirror, but not her face. She was slumped to one side, her cheek pressed against the window glass. She waited so long to reply that Nancy thought she was ignoring the question, or sleeping. But at last she spoke.
“She was sad. She was very, very sad.”
Was Ronnie speaking of herself in the third person now? Was this the transition to bad Ronnie from good, or vice versa? Because surely a baby could not be sad, even in an eleven-year-old girl’s parlance. Unhappy, yes. Bad or mad. But who would ever describe a baby as sad?
“How did you know the baby was…sad?”
Again, a long time passed before there was any sound from the backseat. “It’s complicated,” Ronnie said at last, sounding like Alice when she had invoked her “past”—rehearsed, channeling words suggested by someone older. “It’s a very complicated story.”
She did not speak again for the duration of the ride. And now she was sleeping. Infante and Nancy studied her through the glass. In her T-shirt and jeans, she looked younger than she was. Yet she could have looked much older with minimal effort—a short skirt, a little makeup. That was the odd trick of eighteen, Nancy remembered. You could turn the clock forward or backward, be a kid when it suited you, or fool the world into thinking you were a woman. It was a time filled with promises. She had broken up with Andy the summer she was eighteen, taken a chance on the world at large. Then she ran back to him, realizing she shouldn’t reject the great luck of meeting her soul mate at age fourteen.
“First she runs, now she sleeps,” Infante said. “She’s like a textbook example of guilt.”
“She’s got to be exhausted,” Nancy said, a sense of fairness automatic with her. “She has had a pretty long day. And she seemed genuinely baffled when I mentioned Brittany Little.”
“You’re tired, and you’re not sleeping. The only difference between the two of you is she knows what happened to Brittany Little and you don’t. You think we should wake her up?”
“I’m telling you, it can’t be done. She’s dead to the world.”
The words hung on, and Nancy wished she had chosen a different way to say it.
Yes, Ronnie Fuller slept, but there was neither innocence nor guilt in her sleep, just a lifelong way of coping with a world that bewildered her. She had always been able to sleep, in almost any circumstances. She had slept through the night at the age of three months. As a toddler, she had dozed in the backseat of the family car, wedged so tightly between her brothers that her father said they didn’t need seat belts, not that the old Ford station wagon had any. She had napped in school, leading her teachers to suspect a chaotic home life that didn’t allow her to get enough rest, and they were half right. Ronnie had a chaotic home life, but she got plenty of rest, which saved her from much of it. Her bed was her one private place in a most unprivate household.
And when her youngest older brother, Matthew, began trying to get into her bed when she was nine, she used sleep to keep herself safe.
Matthew was twelve at the time, and Ronnie had suspected for several days that he was planning something for her. So far, most of Matthew’s plans for her had been cruel but tolerable—pinches, hits, endless “Punch buggies, no punch backs.” If she weathered these attacks without comment or reaction, Matthew usually grew bored and found someone or something else to torture. Helen Manning had told Ronnie the story of the Snow Queen, and Ronnie quickly saw the advantage in having a splinter of ice in the heart, as long as you could take it out at will. She thought of herself as the Stone Queen, holding a pose in Freeze Tag. Ronnie had always been good at Freeze Tag.
On an August evening, the year Matthew was twelve and Ronnie was nine, he came into her room when the house was quiet, or as quiet as it ever got, with the living room television blaring into the night, her father’s snores rising and falling. Matthew’s hands were clutched at the groin of his pajamas, as if he had to pee, and he was holding himself so only the tip peeked out. It was the same way he held the baby field mice he sometimes captured in the Mannings’ wild, overgrown backyard. Ronnie could see all this because her eyes were fake-squinched shut, allowing a tiny field of vision through her lashes. She had been lying there, barely breathing, waiting to see what Matthew was going to do when he came for her. She had known, somehow, it would be this night.
“Ronnie,” he whispered hoarsely. “Ronnie, are you awake?”
She let out a sigh, the kind of half-murmur, half-talk sound that her father made when he fell asleep on the sofa after dinner, before moving on to an impressive crescendo of snores. She didn’t dare try fake-snoring because she knew it would come out like a cartoon character, all whistles and lip-flaps.
“I’ve got something I want to show you.” Matthew reached for her wrist, but Ronnie rolled over as if in a restless dream, pinning her arms in a tight V beneath her stomach, hands crossed at her crotch.
“Ronnie, Ronnie. C’mon, Ronnie, it’s a secret, a really cool secret.”
It was all she could do not to say, “It’s not such a secret, dummo.” She knew about sex, if not all its particulars. Her mother had miscarried when Ronnie was four, leading to an early overview of the facts of life. Cable movies and soap operas had filled in the gaps, and Ronnie had a general idea of what went where, what the consequences were, and the odd effect the whole enterprise had on men. She had even seen movies on television that explained why her brother was here, in the middle of the night. These things happened in families, according to the movies, but it was always, always wrong, even when the boy was handsome, which Matthew wasn’t, and really loved the girl, which Matthew didn’t.
But Ronnie would lose a confrontation with Matthew. He would hit her, she would yell, and her father would come in and dispense slaps all around, indifferent to what had caused the noise. The next night, Matthew would come back, the sequence would be repeated, and eventually, he would take what he wanted from her. As for telling her parents what Matthew was trying to do—well, it was too shameful. Ronnie felt she had to protect her mother from the truth about her youngest son—what he did to neighborhood merchants, not to mention cats, how he behaved at school. She had to protect her mother, in general, from the ugliness of life. Her mother didn’t know how awful the world was. Her mother liked to talk about the old shows she had watched on something called Picture for a Sunday Afternoon, back when the world had only three channels. Ronnie didn’t want her mother to know how things had changed, that children were so dirty now, that there were a hundred channels full of things no one should see.
Helen Manning was clearly sophisticated enough, but Ronnie would be even more ashamed to tell a neighbor about Matthew. This was back when Matthew was the bad one, the one headed for trouble and juvenile hall. Funny, he had turned out okay after it became clear that Ronnie was so awful that no one else in the family could ever be known as the bad one. Ronnie never forgot his face the day they came for her, the stunned, almost joyous look of reprieve. He didn’t have to be the bad one anymore.
But this was two years earlier. On her stomach at the age of nine, arms beneath her, hands pressed over her private parts, he was still bad and Ronnie was good, or at least better than him. Smarter, too. She realized she was impenetrable as long as she kept up the pretense of sleeping. Perhaps an older boy, a more vicious one, would have kept going, but Matthew assumed he needed Ronnie’s cooperation. The female body was mysterious to him. He would never find his way inside without a little help.
Matthew shook her by the shoulders, hissed her name in ever more ferocious whispers. He poked her hip with the hard novelty of himself, which really grossed her out, but it didn’t feel much different from a finger, so she continued to sleep. Soon enough, she wasn’t pretending. She drowsed through his whispered come-ons, neither asleep nor awake
, until he finally gave up. Later, Ronnie heard that he got a girl in his class to do it, a stupid girl that everyone made fun of, and she was doubly glad she hadn’t let him.
Even at Harkness and later, at Shechter, Ronnie never had trouble sleeping. If they hadn’t kept her to such a strict schedule, she would have slept ten, eleven, twelve hours every night, and taken naps during the day. But excessive sleep was considered a bad sign at Shechter, so she gave it up. It was part of the price of staying there.
Tonight, she had slept a little bit in the old cabin, leaning against the wall. There had been nothing to do but sleep and wait. She knew she would be found. If anything, she had been surprised at how long she ended up waiting in the shack. The sky was still light when she closed her eyes, and it had been a little frightening to wake to such a deep, complete darkness. Most places in Baltimore were louder than Ronnie remembered, but Leakin Park was quieter and darker.
This was not her first visit back to the shack. She had ended up here, almost by accident, soon after she came home. It had seemed so natural, walking along Franklintown Road, tracing the old paths. She had always felt the park was hers, a secret to share with others. Ronnie had discovered the cabin the summer she was ten, and it had been hard to convince Alice to follow her here. Alice was such a scaredycat. But once Alice saw the cabin, she began to take over, making all these silly rules and insisting on her stupid games. “You be the student and I’ll be the teacher.” “You be the daddy and I’ll be the mommy.” “You be the fox and I’ll be the chicken.” “You be the kangaroo and I’ll be the koala bear.” Alice gave herself the best parts, which she said was only fair because she was the one with the ideas.
Ronnie slept. Ronnie dreamed. Her dreams were in black and white, like her mother’s Picture for a Sunday Afternoon. She remembered them the way most people remember their dreams the morning after, in vague fragments. She was surprised, come the end of sleep, how hard it was to make a straightforward story out of what had seemed logical and normal in the night. Helen was often there, and Ronnie’s mother, and now her doctor. Her dreams were neither scary nor soothing. They just were.
Every Secret Thing Page 21