Lippman, Laura (14 page)

“Did you ever break him down, get him to change his story?”

“No. He was consistent, albeit in the way that liars are consistent. Maybe he was getting a blow job in the mall bathroom that afternoon from some teenage boy and feared that getting out. At any rate, he never changed his story, and now he’s dead.”

“I’m assuming you checked out the parents?”

“Parents, neighbors, friends. You’ll find it all in there. And there were extortion calls, too, claims from people who said they had the girls. Nothing ever checked out. It was almost enough to make you believe in the supernatural or alien abductions.”

“Given that you read the obituaries so closely—”

“You will, too, one day.” Willoughby had a way of smiling, a kind of double-edged superiority. Irritating as hell. “Sooner than you think.”

“I guess you know whether the parents are alive? I didn’t get any hits on them.”

“Dave passed away the year I retired, 1989. Miriam moved to Texas, then Mexico. She sent me Christmas cards for a while….”

He got up and went to a highly polished piece of furniture that Infante thought of as a ladies’ desk, because it was small and impractical, with dozens of little drawers and a tiny, slanted writing surface that couldn’t even hold a computer. The old cop may have needed reminding that he had the Bethany file, but he knew exactly where that Christmas card was.
Jesus
, Infante thought,
I don’t care what Lenhardt says. I hope I never have a case like this
.

Then he remembered that he did, that he was sitting with a cardboard legacy at his feet. He saw himself thirty years in the future, passing the box along to another detective, telling the story of the Jane Doe and how she’d hoaxed them for a couple of days, then turned out to be a fake. Once you got inside something like the Bethany case, did you ever really get out?

“The envelope’s long gone, so if there was a return address, I couldn’t tell you what it was. But I remember the town—San Miguel de Allende. See? She mentions it here.”

Infante inspected the card, a lacy green cutout of a dove overlaid on a heavy piece of vellum. Inside, FELIZ NAVIDAD had been printed in red ink, and a few lines had been scrawled beneath it.
Hope this finds you well. San Miguel de Allende seems to be my home now, for better or worse
.

“When was this?”

“At least five years ago.”

Infante jumped on the date. “The twenty-fifth year of their disappearance.”

“In Miriam’s case that was probably subconscious. She was very intent on pushing the memories down, trying to move on. Dave was the exact opposite. Every day he lived was a conscious tribute to those girls.”

“And that’s when she moved, after he died?”

“When—Oh, no. My mistake. Speaking from what my wife called ‘deep context,’ as if everything known to me is known to you. Even more unforgivable, when one has been hoarding the context. Miriam and Dave separated a little more than a year after the girls disappeared, and she went back to using her maiden name, Toles. It wasn’t a happy marriage, even before. I liked Dave. In fact, I considered him a friend. But he didn’t appreciate what he had in Miriam.”

Infante fingered the card, studying the older man’s face.
But you did, didn’t you
? It wasn’t just the sense of a job undone that had led Willoughby to file this card in a place he remembered so readily. Infante wondered what the mother looked like, if she was a sunny little blonde like the daughters. A certain kind of police—a guy like this Willoughby—he’d be a sucker for a good-looking woman in distress.

“I’m assuming the medical records are in here?”

“Such as they are.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Dave had some, um, interesting ideas about doctors. Less was more, in his opinion. No tonsillectomies for his daughters, and as I understand it, he was ahead of his time on that. But also no X-rays, because he believed that even small doses of radiation were dangerous.”

“You mean—”
Fuck me
.

“Right. The dental records include exactly one set of X-rays, taken when Sunny was nine and Heather was six. And that’s it.”

No adult dental records, no blood information on record, not even type. Infante didn’t have the tools he would have expected to have in 1975, much less 2005.

“Any advice?” he asked, putting the lid back on the box.

“If your Jane Doe’s story doesn’t fall apart in the face of the information in the file, then find Miriam and bring her back. I’d put everything on her maternal instincts.”

Yeah, and you’d probably like to get a look at your old crush, you being a widower and all.

“Anything else?”

Willoughby shook his head. “No, I have to—If you knew what I felt, just looking at that box. It isn’t healthy. It’s all I can do to let you walk out of here with it, not to beg to come along to the hospital with you and interrogate the woman. I know so much about these girls, about their lives, especially that last day. In some ways, I’m surer of the facts of their lives than I am of my own. Maybe I know them too well. Wouldn’t it be something if a pair of fresh eyes saw something that had been staring me in the face all those years ago?”

“Look, I’ll keep you in the loop. If you like. Up or down, I’ll call you, tell you how it turns out.”

“Okay,” he said in a tone that suggested he wasn’t at all sure that was okay, and Infante felt as if he were pressing a drink on a guy who swore he needed to quit but could never quite manage it. He probably should leave the guy be, if possible. He thought he would have been more intrigued, having the old case resurface. But Willoughby looked out the window, studying the sky, seemingly more interested in the weather than the long-gone Bethany girls.

“Heather…”

“Yes, Kay?”

Heather’s face filled with light at the sound of her name. Just hearing it was a homecoming, a reunion. Why had it been denied to her for so long? Where could she have been, what could have happened to her that she didn’t, couldn’t, reclaim her identity years ago?

“I hate to do this, but there’s so much that has to be straightened out. A discharge plan, insurance—”

“I do have insurance. I
do
. The hospital will be paid. But I just can’t tell you yet the account, the ID number.”

“Sure, I understand.” Kay paused, thinking about what she’d said, something she said every day, a phrase others used all the time. It was automatic. It was also seldom true. “Actually, I
don’t
understand, Heather.” That little beam of resurrection again. “Whatever happened, you’re clearly the victim here. Are you frightened? Are you trying to hide from someone? Perhaps you’d like to speak to someone on the psychiatric staff, someone with experience in post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“I talked to someone.” Heather made a face. “Strange little man.”

Kay couldn’t disagree with that assessment of Schumeier. “He administered a basic psych exam. But if you’d like to explore other…issues, I could arrange that.”

Heather’s smile was mirthless, mocking. “You speak sometimes as if you ran the hospital, as if the doctors did what you told them to do.”

“No, not exactly, it’s just that I’ve been here so long, almost twenty years, and worked in so many departments…” Kay was stammering as if she’d been caught in a lie, or at least in the very act of self-aggrandizement that Heather was suggesting. The initial psych report had indicated that Heather was sane by clinical definition, but not particularly empathetic or interested in people. Yet she noticed things, Kay was beginning to realize, picked up subtle details quickly.
Strange little man
. That was Schumeier in a nutshell.
You speak sometimes as if you ran the hospital
. She noticed things and used them against people.

Gloria Bustamante sailed in, the usual physical wreck, but her eyes bright and focused.

“What are we talking about?” she asked, settling in the room’s only chair. Her voice was brisk and not a little acidic.

“Discharge,” Kay said.

“Kay,” Heather said.

“An interesting topic,” Gloria said. “Discharge, I mean. Not Kay. Although Kay is
fascinating
in her own right.” Was her smile faintly lascivious? Had she misunderstood Kay’s solicitation of this favor? Did anyone really know what Gloria’s sexual orientation was, or were the rumors about her as groundless as the things said about Kay behind her back?

“I hit my head,” Heather said. Petulant now, her pouting-child act. “I fractured a bone in my forearm. Why can’t I stay in the hospital?”

Gloria shook her head. “Sweetie, you could have your head amputated and they’d be trying to get you out of this costly little bed, which they bill at the same rate as a suite at the Ritz-Carlton. And given that you won’t tell us your insurance carrier, the hospital is all the more desperate to get rid of you, lest they be stuck with the bill.”

“Indigent patients mean higher board costs for all,” Kay said, registering her own priggish tone. “It really is a waste of a bed. Under normal circumstances a patient such as Heather might have been kept overnight for observation, because of the head injury. But there’s no medical reason for her to remain here, and the issue needs to be resolved.”

“Everyone’s clock is ticking,” Gloria said. “The hospital’s, mine. The only person
not
worried about billing right now is Detective Kevin Infante. He told me this morning that if Heather declines to go before a grand jury, she could be held on the hit-and-run. The best I can do is push for home detention.”

Heather jerked up in bed, wincing in pain as she did so. “Where—not jail, not police custody. I’d die. I’d absolutely die.”

“Not to worry,” Gloria assured her. “I pointed out to the police that it would be disastrous, publicity-wise, to lock up the missing Bethany sister.”

“But I don’t want
any
publicity, so how can you use this as leverage?”

“I know that. You know that.” A sideways glance at Kay. “And now
she
knows that, for better or worse. I’m going to trust you not to run and tattle, Kay. I came here as a favor to you, so you owe me that much.”

“I would never—”

Gloria plowed on, indifferent to what Kay had to say. It would be interesting to know what a psych exam on Gloria Bustamante might reveal.

“The boy is not that badly injured, as it turns out. It looked awful, apparently, and they were worried about a spinal injury, but he’s been moved from Shock Trauma to ICU already.”

“The boy?” Heather asked, brow furrowed.

“In the SUV that tipped over after you sideswiped it.”

“But I saw a girl—I was so sure that I saw a girl, a girl in rabbit-fur earmuffs….”

“There was no girl in the car,” Gloria said. “It was a little boy who was taken to Shock Trauma.”

Heather sat up straighter in bed. “And I didn’t sideswipe anyone. The driver of the SUV hit me, and he overreacted. It’s
not
my fault.”

“That’s an easier case to make,” Gloria said dryly, “when you don’t flee the scene and leave your damaged car on the roadside. But we’re going to chalk that up to the head injury, try the Halle Berry defense.”

“Who?” Kay asked, and the other two women regarded her as if she were genuinely freakish.

Gloria perched on a corner of Heather’s bed. “The more pressing problem is that the police continue to insist that you’re required to provide the name and address under which your driver’s license was issued. Without those, you can be jailed in connection with the accident. So far, I’ve managed to persuade them that your potential as a material witness trumps your role as a defendant in a highway collision that was really no one’s fault. But they’re getting restless. We need to throw them a few facts to satiate them. How long has it been since you were Heather, Heather?”

She closed her eyes. Her skin was so fair and the lids so thin that it appeared as if she were wearing blue-pink eye shadow, lightly applied.

“Heather disappeared thirty years ago. The last time I changed names—it’s been sixteen years. My longest stretch yet. I’ve been this me longer than I’ve been any other me.”

“Penelope Jackson?” Kay asked, knowing of the name the patrol cop had used when Heather was admitted Tuesday night.

“No,” Heather said sharply, eyes flying open. “I am
not
Penelope Jackson. I don’t even know Penelope Jackson.”

“Then how—”

Gloria held up a hand to stave off Kay’s questions, and it was impossible not to notice how ragged her manicure was, how dull her diamond rings were. A piece of jewelry must be very dirty indeed if Kay’s eyes registered it as dull.

“Kay, I trust you, I do. And I need your help. But you have to respect boundaries. There are some things that must remain, for now, between Heather and me.
If
—always if, understand that I am speaking speculatively for now—Heather obtained her current identity illegally, then I’m going to argue she’s entitled to protect that information under the Fifth Amendment—no self-incrimination. She’s trying to protect her life and I’m trying to protect her rights.”

“Fine. But it’s harder to help if I don’t have sufficient information.”

Gloria smiled, not buying it. “I don’t need a second chair, Kay. I need someone who can guarantee housing for Heather while this is being straightened out. Housing and, perhaps, public assistance, short term.”

Kay did not bother to ask why Gloria couldn’t lend her client money or take her into her home. Such things would have been anathema to the attorney, who had already violated her own standards by taking a case without a big fat retainer up front.

“Gloria, you are so out of the loop. There hasn’t been financial assistance for single adults in Maryland since…shit, the early 1990s. And to qualify for anything, you need papers. Birth certificate, Social Security.”

“What about a victims’ assistance network? Isn’t there some advocacy group we could plug Heather into?”

“They specialize in emotional support, not financial.”

“This is what the police are counting on,” Gloria said. “Heather Bethany has no money, nowhere to go—except jail. In order to prevent that, she has to reveal where she’s been living, what she’s been doing. But Heather doesn’t want to do that.”