Lippman, Laura (19 page)

“I thought I’d go outside,” she said.

“Cold as it is?”

“Just around the property. Not far.”

She walked to the orchard, to the cherry tree. This time of year, it was hard to say if one really saw buds or if it was just wishful thinking, a trick of the March dusk, creating gray-green shadows that looked like the promise of new life.

“I kissed a boy today,” she told the tree, the twilight, the ground. No one was impressed, but the normalcy of it made her feel that maybe she could be normal again, that she could retrace her steps and get things right. One day.

She was Ruth, from Bexley, Ohio. Her whole family burned up in a fire when she was three or four. She had jumped out the second-floor window, breaking her ankle. That’s why she was a grade behind where she should be, because of all the time in the hospital. No, she had not been left back. She just didn’t get to do any schoolwork that year. And school was different in Ohio. That’s why she didn’t know some things she should know.

Yes, she had scars, but they weren’t where you could see them, even when she wore a bathing suit.

“I can’t,” she said. “I just can’t.”

Odd, the things that stuck with you from school. Infante hadn’t been much of a student, but he’d liked history for a while there. In Jane Doe’s hospital room Friday morning—and he was insisting on thinking of her as Jane Doe, now more than ever—Infante was reminded of something he once heard about Louis XIV. Or maybe XVI. The point was, he remembered how certain kings made their servants watch them dress, and that was supposed to establish their power. Dress and bathe and God knows what else. As a fourteen-year-old in Massapequa, he hadn’t bought it. Who looked less powerful than a naked man, or a guy taking a dump? But watching Jane D. do her thing this morning, the history lesson came back to him.

Which isn’t to say she was disrobing for him—anything but. She was still in her hospital gown, her bony shoulders draped with a bright shawl. Yet she was ordering around Gloria and the hospital social worker, what’s-her-name, in this very queenly fashion, acting as if he weren’t in the room at all. If he didn’t know the first thing about her—and, again, he was sticking by that notion—he would have diagnosed her a rich bitch, or a daddy’s girl at the very least, someone used to getting her way. With men
and
women. These two were jumping, vying for the right to do things for her.

“My clothes—” she began, eyeing the outfit she had been wearing when she was admitted, and even Kevin could see why she wouldn’t want to put them on again. They were sweat-type things, a loose top and yoga pants, the Under Armor brand that was so hot locally, and they were giving off a stale smell—not the hard-core acrid odor of a workout but that slept-in, lived-in-too-long kind of smell. He wondered how many miles she had driven in them before the accident.
All the way from Asheville? Then how did you buy gas, with no billfold or cash
? Could she have flung her wallet out of the car? Gloria kept trying to portray the events after the accident as pure panic, the faulty decisions made by adrenaline. But you could counter that it was all calculated, that she had fled the scene to give herself time to come up with a story.

A story that had been enlarged to include a cop-perpetrator when this woman learned that the state’s attorney thought she should be grand juried or locked up. And sure enough, the state’s attorney had blinked, agreed to let her stay out of jail as long as Gloria would vouch for her remaining in Baltimore. Infante had to admit, a person would have to be really ballsy to flee Gloria. She’d hunt the woman down for her fee alone.

“There’s a Salvation Army over on Patapsco Avenue,” said the social worker. Kay, that was it. “Really, they have some very nice things.”

“Patapsco Avenue,” Lady X said in a musing, remembering tone, a little arch to Infante’s ears. “I think there was a discount seafood place up there, once upon a time. It’s where my family bought crabs.”

He jumped on that. “You came all the way over here to buy seafood, living in Northwest Baltimore?”

“My dad was big on bargains. Bargains and…idiosyncrasy. You know, why drive ten minutes for steamed crabs if you could go clear across the city, save a buck a dozen,
and
have a story to tell? Come to think of it, wasn’t there a place around here that served deep-fried green-pepper rings dipped in powdered sugar?”

Kay shook her head. “I’ve heard people speak of them, but I’ve lived in Baltimore my whole life and never seen such a thing on any menu.”

“Just because you don’t see something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.” She was queenly again, lifting her chin. “I sat in plain sight for years and no one ever saw me.”

Good, she was finally in the neighborhood of where this conversation should have been going all along. “Your appearance wasn’t altered at all?”

“Nice’n Easy took my hair two shades darker. I asked to be a redhead like Anne of Green Gables, but what
I
wanted was seldom of interest.” She met his gaze. “I’m guessing you weren’t much of an L. M. Montgomery fan.”

“Who was he?” he asked obediently, knowing he was being set up, letting the trio of women laugh at him. He could afford such laughter—use it to his advantage, even. Let her think he was an idiot. Wouldn’t it be great if Gloria went on the clothes-shopping mission with Kay? But he was never going to get that lucky. “Seriously—”

“I started to grow,” she said, as if anticipating where he was going. “And although everyone knew that I’d have to grow if I was still alive, I think that was part of the reason no one ever recognized me. That, and being just the one.”

“Yeah, your sister. What happened to her? That would be a good place to start.”

“No,” she said. “It wouldn’t be.”

“Gloria said you had lots to say. About a cop, in fact. I was summoned here this morning on the understanding that you were ready to tell me everything.”

“I can do the generalities. I’m still not sure I should deal in specifics, yet. I don’t feel that you’re on my side.”

“You’re saying you’re a victim, a hostage held against her will, and you’re implying that your sister was killed. Why wouldn’t I be on your side?”

“See, there it is:
You’re saying
. Not that I am but that I claim to be. Your skepticism makes it very hard for me to trust you. That, and the likelihood that you’ll do everything you can to discredit a story that doesn’t reflect well on one of your department’s own.”

She had hit a nerve there, but he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of seeing how much it bugged him, how it had set off all sorts of alarms in the department. “It’s a way of talking, that’s all. Don’t read so much into it.”

She ran her right hand, the one that wasn’t bandaged, through her hair, and held his gaze. Their game of visual chicken dragged on until she blinked, fluttering her eyelids as if exhausted. Yet he had the sense that she was simply allowing him the illusion of winning, that she could have gone much longer. Piece o’ work, this one, a real piece o’ work.

“I knew a girl—” she began, behind closed eyes.

“Heather Bethany? Penelope Jackson?”

“This was high school. While I was still with
him
.”

“Where—”

“Later. In good time.” Eyes open now, but trained on the wall to her left. “I knew a girl, and she was popular. A cheerleader, a good student. Sweet, though. The kind of girl that adults admired. She dated, a lot. Older boys, college boys. In—where this was—there was a lake, and kids went there on date nights to drink and make out. Her parents didn’t want her to be in cars late at night, driving on those roads with inexperienced boys. So they made her a deal. If she would bring her dates home, to their house, they would respect her privacy. She and her date would have the rec room to themselves. There would be no curfew. Beer could be consumed, within reason. After all, they could have crossed the state line, where the drinking age was eighteen at the time. In the rec room, they could drink beer and watch television and know that—short of her screaming ‘Fire!’ or ‘Rape!’—no parent would enter the room. Her parents would stay in their bedroom, two floors away, and respect her privacy. What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know.”
Christ, I don’t care
. But he had to pretend that he did. This one drank up attention like water.

“She did everything.
Everything
. She perfected the art of the blow job. She lost her virginity. Her parents thought they had figured it out so neatly, that they could give her freedom and she would be too inhibited to use it. They thought she wouldn’t really take them at their word, that she would worry about them crossing the threshold. So here was this girl, this sweet, popular girl, all but starring in pornos in her parents’ rec room, and it didn’t change her reputation one whit.”

“Is this a story about you?”

“No. It’s a story about perceptions, about what you get to be in public and what you are in private. Right now I’m a private person. Anonymous, unknown, ordinary. But when I start to tell you what happened to me, you’re going to think I’m dirty. Nasty. You won’t be able to help yourself. The cheerleader in the basement can give out all the blow jobs she likes. But the little girl who doesn’t try to escape from her captor and abuser, who gets raped every night, she’s harder to understand. She must have liked it, if she didn’t run away. Right? And that’s without the guy being a cop on top of everything else.”

“I’m a police,” he said. “I don’t blame victims.”

“But you categorize them, right? You feel differently about, say, a woman beaten to death by her husband than you do about a drug dealer killed by a rival. That’s just human nature. And you’re human—right?” Kevin glanced over at Gloria. In his experience, she kept her clients on a tight leash, interrupting and directing interviews. But she was letting this one run the show. In fact, she seemed a little mesmerized by her. “I want to help you, but I want to preserve what little normalcy I have. I don’t want to be the freak of the week on all those news channels. I don’t want police officers poking around in my present life, talking to neighbors and coworkers and bosses.”

“And friends? Family?”

“I don’t have those.”

“But you know we’re trying to find your mother, Miriam, down in Mexico.”

“Are you sure she’s alive? Because—” She stopped herself.

“Because what? Because you think she’s dead? Because you
counted
on her being dead?”

“Why don’t you ever use my name when you speak to me?”

“What?”

“Gloria does. Kay does. But you never call me anything. You used my mother’s name just then, but you’ve never used mine. Don’t you believe me?”

She listened well, better than most. You had to really listen to pick up on the omissions in another person’s conversation, and she was right—there was no way he was going to call her Heather. He didn’t believe her, plain and simple, had her pegged as a liar from the first time he met her. “Look, it’s not about belief or trust or sympathy. I like to work from established facts. Things that can be verified, and you haven’t really given me any of those. Why were you so sure your mother was dead?”

“Around the time I turned eighteen—”

“What year was that?”

“April third, 1981. Please, Detective. I know my own birthday. No small miracle, given how many different birthdays I’ve had in my life.”

“Heather Bethany’s birthday is on the Internet. It was in the news stories. Everyone knows that Heather Bethany was just days away from her twelfth birthday when she disappeared.”

She didn’t bother to answer things she didn’t want to answer, more evidence of her shrewdness. “Anyway, around the time I turned eighteen, I was on my own. Cut loose, put on a bus, given lovely parting gifts, and sayonara.”

“He freed you, just like that? Kept you for six years and then waved bye-bye, with no fear of where you would go or what you would tell people?”

“He told me every day that my parents didn’t want me, that no one was looking for me, that I had no family to return to, that my parents had broken up and moved away. Eventually I came to believe that.”

“Still, what happens when you’re eighteen? Why does he let you go?”

She shrugged. “He’d lost interest. I was less…malleable as time went on. Still under his thumb, but beginning to nip at that thumb, make my own demands. It was time for me to support myself. I got on a bus—”

“Where?”

“Not yet. I won’t tell you where I started. But I got off in Chicago. It was so cold for April. I never knew April could be so cold. And there was a ticker-tape parade downtown, for the shuttle astronauts who had just returned. I remember wandering out of the bus station, into the Loop, and finding myself in the aftermath of this huge celebration. But I had missed the good part. All that was left was the trash.”

“That’s a nice story, I guess. Is it true or is it just a metaphor?”

“You’re
smart
.” Admiring and insulting at the same time.

“Why wouldn’t I be? Because I’m a cop?”

“Because you’re handsome.” To his own irritation he blushed, although it was far from the first time a woman had praised his looks. “It cuts both ways, you know. Men think pretty girls are dumb, but women think the same thing about a certain kind of man. One of the worst things you can do, as a woman, is have a boyfriend prettier than yourself. You could never be my boyfriend, Detective Infante.”

Through all of this, Gloria Bustamante had been still as a stone gooney-eyed gargoyle, but now she cleared her throat noisily, filling the awkward silence. Maybe she was even more freaked out by this conversation than Infante was.

“Heather does have something she’s willing to give you,” Gloria said. “A factoid, something you can check out and it will go a long way to establishing the authenticity of all her claims.”

“Why can’t she just give a statement?” he asked. “Dates, times, places. The name of the man who kidnapped her and killed her sister. She lived with him for six years. Presumably she knows his goddamn name.”