“Is she here? He-Helen?”
“No. I don’t know where she is. I don’t know where she goes and I don’t know what she does.”
“Does she have a job?”
“She says she can’t find one. But you did, so I have to think it’s a lie.”
Did Helen mean to be unkind? If stupid Ronnie can find a job, anyone can. But Helen had never been cruel to Ronnie on purpose, just careless at times. She probably meant that Ronnie had done well, so Alice could, too.
“What does she do, if she’s not working?”
“She says she walks. For weight loss. Although-well, between us, she is bigger than ever. I’m afraid I didn’t do well by her when I went wading in her father’s gene pool. Between us.”
Between us. There was the magic phrase. Between us, Ronnie, I think you’re the one who has the real imagination. Between us, Ronnie, I think you have an artistic temperament. Between us, Ronnie, I sometimes wonder if a bad fairy switched you and Alice at birth. Have you heard about changelings? Because you are so much more like me than she is. Alice is a good girl, a sweet girl, but you’re a pistol, Ronnie. You’re not scared of anything, are you, Ronnie? Between us, Ronnie, we’re two peas in a pod.
But the words didn’t seem to mean anything to Helen.
“Do you think Alice will be home soon? It’s almost dark.”
“I don’t know, Ronnie. But I don’t think you should hang around here.”
“Don’t you-” Her voice tore a little.
“Oh, no, baby, I’m happy to see you. I really am. But a reporter came by here not more than an hour ago. She wants to write a story about you and Alice. Now, Alice has a lawyer, a smart one this time-well, she has the stupid one again, but the stupid one now works with a smart one-and they’re going to take care of my baby. They promised me that they’ll scare that reporter so badly she won’t even think about putting Alice’s name in the paper. Have you got a lawyer?”
“I haven’t done anything.” Then, remembering what Helen knew, “Not this time.”
“Well, there’s doing and there’s doing, of course. Sometimes the innocent are more in need of legal protection than the guilty. This reporter, she keeps saying she can write the story even if no one talks to her. Maybe she’s bluffing. I don’t know. All I know is I didn’t talk to her, and I wouldn’t, either, if I were you.”
“Where does Alice go, He-Helen? When she goes walking?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know.” The repetition revealed the lie.
“Please, Helen. Please.” For the first time, the proper name slipped out without a stutter.
Helen leaned close to the screen, to a spot almost directly across from Ronnie’s forehead. If Ronnie had tilted her head forward, they would have been touching, more or less.
“She never told me, but I saw her once, when I was coming home from the grocery store. She goes up to the pool. She walks around the swim club, looking at people. Sad, isn’t it?”
Ronnie turned to go, then remembered what she had been longing to ask Helen since she came home. “Helen-do you remember the honeysuckle?”
“You mean…”
“The time I tried to make honeysuckle soda and sell it from a stand, like lemonade?”
Some strange emotion flooded Helen’s face, her voice. “Of course I do, Ronnie. Of course I do. You tried to squeeze the juice from the blossoms into a pitcher of sugar water.”
“It tasted awful. And I picked your vines bare. But you didn’t mind. You weren’t mad at all.”
“It was a good idea,” Helen said. “There should be a honeysuckle soda. You always had good ideas, Ronnie.”
“I did?”
“You did, baby. You absolutely did.”
It was past eight, but Infante and Nancy continued to read files, waiting for the moment when inertia turned to exhaustion and they could go home without feeling guilty. Now and then, Nancy forgot what they were looking for and found herself reading about the low-level medical complaints of a Martin or Moore-asthma attacks, chicken pox-as if they were good beach novels. Then she would start skimming again, looking for any trace of Alice Manning.
“I’ll give you five to one that Alice Manning’s file isn’t even in here. Me, I’m just enjoying this tour of our juvenile justice system. A lot of kids get locked up in twenty years. I bet we’ve already met some of them on this side.”
“Charles Maddox sounds familiar.”
“They all sound familiar. That’s what I’m saying. Hey, here’s Metheny.”
“That psycho had a juvenile record?”
“No, not the same one. Now, that would have been interesting.”
“They usually start off with animal torture, those serial killer types. Animal torture or arson.”
“Wow, Infante, those two weeks at Quantico are really paying off. You could learn that much from watching the A &E criminal justice files.”
“Bite me.”
“You wish. Hey, I may owe you five bucks. I just found a Manning.”
She opened the file and checked the first name and the DOB. Yes, it was the right girl. “Poison ivy. Urinary tract infection, yeast infection, yeast infection…”
“I’m eating here.” Infante indicated the bag of chips and soda that were his dinner for the night.
Nancy laughed, lost her place on the page, then resumed reading. “Man, give this poor girl a lifetime prescription of Monistat. She was really prone-shit.”
“What?”
“Fuck me. Fuck us.”
“What?”
“Alice Manning had a baby. Three years ago.”
“How do you have a baby in juvenile detention?”
“How do you get pregnant in juvenile detention?”
Lenhardt must have been listening through his open door, because he materialized by Nancy’s desk, held out his hand for the folder, and seemed to absorb its contents in one quick glance.
“Even in juvy, it works the same way as it does here in the outside world. The egg goes on a date with the sperm.” Lenhardt continued to flip through the file. “Why do you think Middlebrook is closed for renovations? It’s a shithole.”
“Yeah, but-”
“Where there’s a will there’s a way. Darwin, survival of the fittest, all that crap.” He continued to study the file. “It looks like she managed to hide the pregnancy until she was almost six months gone. They just thought she was a fat girl who was prone to yeast infections. And based on this, she never told them who the father was. That space is blank throughout. A fun fact to know and tell, but does it have anything to do with the case at hand, Detective?”