“No, I don’t,” Ronnie said, “because I don’t know anything.”
“Doesn’t it strike you as kind of a coincidence that this happens so near where you work? And that—” Nancy stopped, still not willing to reveal the missing child’s resemblance to the sister of Olivia Barnes. She needed the girl to volunteer that piece of information. Sharon Kerpelman had said Alice was suggestible, that she would agree to anything in order to be helpful. But Ronnie seemed far more vulnerable on that score.
Nancy pushed the photograph of Brittany Little across the table.
“She’s pretty,” Ronnie said.
“Does she look like anyone you know?”
“Yeah, yeah, she does. A little.”
“Who does she look like, Ronnie?”
“Like Alice?”
“Like Alice? This girl is biracial and has curly hair.”
Ronnie looked confused. “You’re right. I don’t know why I said that. It just popped out. Sometimes I say Alice. I don’t know why.”
“Ronnie, do you think about Alice a lot?”
“No.” She paused. “Not a lot.”
“It would be understandable if you did.”
“Why?”
The girl seemed genuine in her need for a reply, almost yearning. “Because…because of the history you share. I would guess that’s something you don’t forget.”
“Ever?”
“What?”
“Do you think one day I might forget? A man—a doctor—said I might. He said as time went by, I would have other things to think about, other things that would…define me.”
Stumped for something to say, Nancy picked up the photograph and looked at the smiling girl. Are you alive? Please tell me you’re alive.
“You know, we found her clothes in the bathroom.” She wouldn’t mention the hair, not yet. They didn’t want that detail out. Not even the girl’s mother had been told she had been shorn, in part because her own boyfriend might have done it, just to create the illusion of a stranger abduction. “There was blood on them. And blood on a T-shirt.”
Ronnie’s eyes were wide. “A lot?”
“Enough to worry us. Also enough to test—and guess what?” She waited a beat to see if Ronnie would volunteer anything. “It wasn’t the girl’s blood.”
“How could you tell?”
“Blood’s like a fingerprint. It’s unique. It wasn’t her blood, and it wasn’t her mother’s blood. We compared them.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah, it’s amazing what we can do with a little blood. You know, if we took some of your blood and compared it to what we found, and found out it was different, we could let you go home.”
“You want me to give you blood?” Ronnie stiffened and jerked her head back.
“You don’t have to. But it could speed things up. We can take it from your finger, with just a little prick. You ever make yourself blood sisters with someone when you were a kid?”
Ronnie shook her head both ways, from a tentative yes to an increasingly vehement no. She was almost like one of those bobble-head dolls—once her head started to move, she couldn’t seem to regain control of it. Only instead of swaying gently up and down, it continued to swing from side to side. “No, no, no, no, no, no.”
“It’s just a tiny prick, you wouldn’t even notice. And if it’s not your blood—and it won’t be your blood, right, Ronnie, because you don’t know what happened—if it’s not your blood, we have to leave you alone.”
“No.” It wasn’t quite a scream, yet something in the girl’s tone made Nancy jump. “Nobody cuts me but me.”
“What?”
“I mean—I don’t want to. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.”
She began striking her palms on the table now to underscore her words until Nancy finally had to grab her by the wrists to make her stop. For one crazed moment the girl looked as if she wanted to bite her. Her small white teeth snapped near Nancy’s face, the way a terrier might.
Then she went limp, and Nancy released her arms, letting her fall to the table. Cradling her head in her hands, the girl began to cry.
“Is Brittany Little still alive, Ronnie? It will make all the difference in the world if we find her and she’s still alive. And if she’s dead—well, we’ll go easier on the one who helps us. I can’t make a deal, I’m just a police, but it’s always better to be the one who cooperates.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Ask Alice. Take her blood. Ask Alice. Cut Alice.” She looked up then, sniffing, and said the magic words. “I want to go home now. Can I go home now? Can I call my mom? Do I need to call a lawyer?”
“Yes,” Nancy said. “I mean, yes, you can go, and yes, you can call your mom. You don’t really need a lawyer, though.”
Not yet.
She escorted the girl from the room to her desk, and let her use the phone there. As she walked, Ronnie was muttering to herself, and Nancy could just barely make out the words.
“Nobody cuts me but me. Nobody cuts me but me.”
25.
“You should go to her.”
“What?” Cynthia Barnes snapped her head away from the television screen in the kitchen and fumbled without success for the power switch on the remote, as if she had been caught doing something illicit.
“You should go to her,” repeated Warren, standing there in bare feet, his golf shoes in his hand so they wouldn’t damage the stone floor. She still remembered their consternation when the contractor explained, after the fact, that stone could be damaged.
“I have nothing to say to her.” But Maveen Little had finally disappeared, and the face on the television was a child’s, beaming over an Esskay hot dog.
“You have something to share. Something in common.”
It was all she could do not to snap back: I will never have anything in common with Maveen Little.
“I’m worried she’s not going to engender a lot of sympathy,” Cynthia said, picking her words carefully.
“Because she’s unattractive and inarticulate?” Warren was being characteristically generous. Maveen Little was ugly, pale and overweight, with bad skin and a home permanent. “Oh, honey, people aren’t that bad.”
“They’re worse, and you know it.”
Warren had no answer for that, so he kissed her on the temple, more of a father’s kiss than a husband’s, and eeled out the door, his last look for the television, which he clearly yearned to turn off. When had their kisses migrated from mouth to cheek to temple? Before Rosalind’s birth or after? Cynthia couldn’t remember. She supposed a day would come when Warren would kiss the top of her head, or settle for a fond shoulder pat, and she still wouldn’t care. She loved him, possibly more than ever, but she just couldn’t work up the abandon of man-woman love, not while trying to maintain the vigilance required by mother-child love.
This mother’s grief was genuine, at least, the kind of grief that distorted face and voice. Not that anyone could really tell. People liked to say, after the fact, that they suspected the South Carolina woman was lying, that they were not surprised when her little boys turned up at the bottom of a lake. But Cynthia knew that people’s powers of observation were anything but acute.
“Dear Black Bitch,” a concerned citizen had written her seven years ago, divining her address from the numbers on the house, visible in some of the television newscasts, and the newspaper accounts of the crime, which helpfully identified the street. “Who do you think you are kidding? Everyone knows you killed your baby and are trying to get the Black People to Riot again by saying White Children did this. I will be on my roof with my rifle. Just Like 1968. You have already destroyed the city and now the county is full of Negroes, too. When will you be satisfied?”
The detached part of her mind, the part that had split away soon after Olivia was taken, marveled at the letter’s punctuation and capitalization. Just Like 1968. It was as if the writer thought these words constituted a sentence, or at least a complete though
t. Perhaps they did. “Just Like 1968” referred to the riots after King was shot, when white people ran for the city-county line, and the old men of Little Italy really did take their guns to the rooftops, ready to fire if they saw black people crossing Pratt Street.
Maveen Little would get letters, too. The cruelty would be different, more about ignorance than race, although her obvious preference for black men, as evidenced by her café-au-lait child and dark-skinned boyfriend, would draw a few choice comments. No, there would be no shortage of people happy to tell Maveen Little that she was a terrible mother, one who had earned her fate. If the crime proved to be connected to Olivia’s death, Cynthia would come up for dissection again, would be drawn into the circle of blame for the sheer sin of continuing to exist. In the end, no one who had been spared by fate could afford to believe it was random.
Was Brittany Little’s disappearance connected to Olivia’s death? For the first time in years, Cynthia Barnes had read the Sunday paper cover to cover, but she had not expected to find anything she had not known twenty-four hours earlier. Although a civilian for almost seven years now, she had not forgotten the rhythms of the local news operations, the fits and starts with which stories moved forward over a weekend. Only a high-ranking official—the commissioner himself—could confirm that the new case might be linked to an old one, and he wouldn’t do that unless someone knew enough to ask. Even then he might not be allowed to tell, because the girls had been juveniles the first time. She knew enough about the law to know that a jury would never be allowed to consider the earlier murder, not unless the girls themselves took the stand.
But eventually, someone would put two and two together, and then the calls would start. Reporters would finally track Cynthia down, and this time she would be happy to tell them exactly how she felt. Angry, betrayed, saddened. She would play up the sad part, although it was the least of her feelings. She would find a subtle way to remind newspaper readers and television watchers that she was the one who had wanted to find a way to put these girls away for life, not a mere seven years. The public defender, the juvenile master, the girls’ parents—they had acted as if they were doing Cynthia a favor, fashioning the seven-year sentence from a trio of charges. Instead, they had left the entire city vulnerable.
Assuming the cases were connected. She tried to keep her mind open to the possibility that she was wrong, but Cynthia could not see how the resemblance between her daughter and the missing child was a simple coincidence. The hair, the skin tone, the age—it was too creepily similar. She would not have mistaken Brittany Little for her Rosalind, but a nonmother, a person who had glimpsed Rosalind only from afar, could make that error. A person who had studied her, say, from across the street, or in the Giant on Edmondson Avenue. No, it could not be a coincidence.
But then, Cynthia could not accept the idea that Olivia’s death was coincidental, which everyone else, even Warren, had been so ready to believe. Cynthia had seen a rebuke, a conspiracy. “Why do they hate us so?” she had asked her father, all but crawling into his lap as if she were a child again.
The judge had patted her awkwardly, helpless as everyone else. She had never seen her father without the right answer before. But he was dumbfounded, incapable of explaining how two seemingly normal children could do what they had done. A lifetime of being a judge could not prepare a man for this. Anyone who spent time in the Clarence Mitchell Courthouse knew the city’s killers were in the end utterly fathomable. For one thing, they looked like what they were—hard, soulless, dead inside. And they had come honestly by their status, via childhoods so damaging that one wondered more at those who didn’t kill than those who did. They even had motives, however twisted. Judge Poole liked to say that what the drug dealers of Baltimore did wasn’t that different from what the corporations of America did up the road in Delaware, where the federal courts heard cases on takeovers and poison pills. “It’s just a little more direct,” he said of the city’s lethal transactions. “A little more final. But it’s still business.”
Yet even Judge Poole could not see the death of Olivia as anything other than the worst imaginable luck. Cynthia wondered if some well-meaning friend was holding Maveen Little’s hand and trying to comfort her in that inept fashion she could neither forget nor forgive. You couldn’t have done anything…. You didn’t do anything…. Don’t second-guess yourself…. You must not blame yourself. In the days after Olivia’s body was found, nothing had made Cynthia feel worse than the people who had tried to make her feel better.
Should she go see the missing girl’s mother? She wanted to feel something for the woman, but she didn’t, and she wasn’t sure she could fake it very well. Maveen Little made Cynthia feel shamed, as if there were an unwritten protocol for mothers deranged by grief. This woman was so, well, sloppy in her appeals to whatever phantoms held her child. Cynthia had maintained a dignity that some found cold—the “Dear Bitch” letters implied as much—but that was her upbringing. Her parents would not have wanted Cynthia to sob and fling her body about like some ignorant churchwoman. A hard, cynical person—someone like Cynthia’s sister, Sylvia, or even the old Cynthia—might have thought, I’d have snatched Brittany Little, too, to save her from that mama.
Cynthia could never be that casually cruel again. Yet her sorrow for this woman was generic at best, distant. Part of the problem was that Maveen Little was white. More troubling, she was poor, tacky poor. What did Cynthia Barnes have in common with this frizzy-haired woman who shopped at Value City?
Well, black men. But the fact that Maveen Little was the kind of white woman who dated black men only made her more repellent to Cynthia. The boyfriend looked normal enough, and the jailed father had clearly passed some good genes down to the baby. But how could either of them, how could any self-respecting black man think Maveen Little was a prize? Her very name screamed white trash, not to mention the blobby body, the acne-pitted face, the hideous hair. It would be one thing if the Michelle Pfeiffers of the world wanted to go out with brothers, Cynthia could almost abide that scenario, where the black man was so fine that a woman couldn’t help herself. But when you saw one of these pale, cheap-looking fat girls with a black man, the only explanation was that the man was looking for someone weak, someone who wouldn’t call him on his shit. That was the true insult to black women: not the status that white women conferred, but the fact that black men weren’t strong enough. What kind of coward would choose this woman?
And this was the thing about being a victim with a capital V that Cynthia could never make peace with. It was such a pathetic class, filled with losers whom she would never know, much less befriend. Cynthia did not wish her fate on anyone, not even the parents of the children who had destroyed her life. But that didn’t mean she had to embrace other victims, bond with them, pretend they were related.
She had tried, because everyone said she must. In the early years, she had attempted to join two kinds of groups—one for victims of violent crimes and one for parents who had lost their children. But the first group had been filled with ignorant, uneducated people whose very stupidity had played a role in their circumstances. And the second group—well, the second group hadn’t wanted her. Oh, no one had been so bold as to say that. The facilitator—apt title—had been ever so gentle when she came to Cynthia and suggested she would be happier in another group, that losing a child to a disease was profoundly different from losing a child to a violent act.
Tell me about it, Cynthia had thought. But she was too proud to go where she wasn’t wanted, too proud to be seen as the tacky one, bringing the whole group down. So she had stopped going. Stopped going to groups. Stopped going out. Stopped.
Funny, the one person with whom she had felt a real throb of empathy was that famous guitarist, the one whose son had fallen from a window. He was successful, able to provide his child with the best, yet he had been undone by something as simple as an open window. The rock star was vulnerable, she knew, to a certain unspoken criticism. One ran that ri
sk when living an enviable life. People looked to see how your very good fortune had caused your downfall.
That had been her sin, that was why God had punished her. She was guilty of wanting to live an enviable life. It was one thing to be proud, or vain, but Cynthia had invited the world to look at her, to confirm her excellent opinion of herself. Toward that end, she had allowed the city magazine to run photographs of her home, to show her and Warren posed on their front porch, a power couple in the new city order. “Barnes Storming,” the headline had read. After all, he was the most successful black plaintiff ’s attorney in town, turning lead paint into gold. She was the woman who controlled access to the mayor, the voice in the ear, the gatekeeper.
She had not allowed the magazine to photograph Olivia. Give her that much. She had not paraded her motherhood. But she let it be known that she was one of those women who was juggling, that she had returned to her job at the mayor’s office after a mere three months off—and gotten her figure back in a remarkable six months. If she hadn’t, she would never have posed for that photograph. Because of the magazine’s long lead time, it had run two months later, a month before Olivia was killed. One of her more thoughtful correspondents had enclosed that photograph, scrawling “Pride goeth before a fall” across Cynthia’s trim waist, which was emphasized by the fitted coral suit she had chosen.
Cynthia, thanks to her family’s churchgoing habits, knew the letter writer had mangled the proverb: Pride goeth before destruction. It was a haughty spirit that led to a mere fall.
She turned off the television and went upstairs to dress. She wasn’t sure what one wore to pay a call on a grieving mother who was in denial of her grief, couldn’t remember what people had worn to call on her. Her outfit should be casual, but not too casual, brightly colored. Nothing black, nothing somber, nothing suggestive of funerals. If Cynthia Barnes could make one wish for Maveen Little’s sake, it would be to draw out this limbo. That was something that only she could understand, that the rest of the world got backward. As horrible as this uncertainty was, the days of knowledge would be more horrible still.
Every Secret Thing Page 23