“She had this baby three years ago. Isn’t that what the file says? Alice’s child, wherever she is, would be about three now.”
“So?” Lenhardt asked, but there was no challenge in his voice, no doubt. He simply wanted to hear where Nancy’s mind was going.
“That’s the age of the missing girl.”
Does she look like anyone? Nancy had asked Ronnie Fuller, pushing the photograph of Brittany Little across the table.
Alice, Ronnie had said. She looks like Alice. Ronnie had corrected herself when Nancy challenged her, but the girl’s first instinct had been pure and automatic. Not the daughter of Cynthia and Warren Barnes. Alice. She didn’t look like the Alice that Nancy knew, but Ronnie had known another Alice, a little girl. Ronnie carried another Alice around in her head.
“We know from DNA testing,” Lenhardt said, “that the girl is the biological child of Maveen Little.”
“We know that,” Nancy agreed. “But Alice doesn’t. All Alice knows is that she had a baby and she doesn’t anymore. Maybe the child was put up for adoption, maybe she died, maybe the grandparents are raising her. But there’s no baby in the Manning household.”
“Why kidnap Brittany Little?”
“A girl who can’t find her own doll might steal another’s. And even Alice never denied taking Olivia Barnes.”
Helen Manning sat in her dark living room. She wished she had some dope, but she wasn’t sure she would smoke it even if she did. Alice would know what it was now. Perhaps Alice had always known. Helen had once thought her daughter docile and obedient, unquestioning. But that belief was long gone, seven years gone.
She knew, this time, that Alice was involved in whatever was going on. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice-that was the key difference between then and now. Seven years ago, Helen had gone about her life blissfully detached from the tragedy unfolding a few blocks away, allowing herself the rationalizations that made such news bearable. The missing child was a baby, not a grade-schooler like Alice. The missing baby had been left untended. The missing baby was probably taken by a baby-sitter, or someone with a specific grudge against that family. There was even a theory, manufactured from nothing, that the child had been taken to get back at the judge. Even then, Helen understood that people needed to tell themselves such stories in order to go on about their lives.
She thought she had managed the trick of telling Alice what she needed to hear, while remaining honest with herself. She had never forgotten that Alice’s father was not dead in a car crash, while Alice accepted this information as an article of faith. Sweet Alice had been content not to press Helen on this issue, not to force her to pile too many lies on the initial one. A considerate child, content to settle for a few stories about romantic dates and the proposal that never was.
Then there were the lies Helen had told her parents, after Alice was arrested. Had Alice really been involved in this horrible thing? Yes, but only because she was weak and impressionable. Did she understand what she was doing? Not really. Why hadn’t she stopped the other child? She says she wasn’t there.
Helen remembered so clearly the night that Olivia Barnes died, not that she knew the poor child was dying at the time. Alice had been particularly sweet at dinner, laughing at everything Helen said, admiring what she wore, asking her questions about her painting, which she had never done before. She had gone through Helen’s jewelry box and makeup, asked to play dress-up. Then, almost apologetically, she had asked Helen to read to her.
“Old as you are?”
“I know I can read to myself,” Alice had said. “But you do it so much better, with so much expression.”
They had piled onto Helen’s bed, reading portions of chapter books-The Search for Delicious, Glinda of Oz, Helen’s favorite of the Oz books. They read baby books like In the Night Kitchen, which Helen had always preferred to Where the Wild Things Are. Alice knew better than to laugh at the naked boy falling through the sky, although she did place her finger, just once, on his exposed private parts.
“What time is it?” she kept asking her mother. It was eight o’clock, it was eight forty-five, it was nine-twenty, it was ten-fifteen. “What time is it?” Time for bed, Helen said as eleven o’clock came and went. She tucked Alice in and went downstairs, feeling pleased with the world and herself. She had done well for a single mother. Alice was a lovely child, even if she did yearn so for everyone’s approval. She would grow out of that. Helen would see to it.
It was past twelve when Helen heard a strange snuffling sound coming from the backyard and found Ronnie huddled beneath the overhanging honeysuckle vines. And it was only then that Helen understood why Alice had wanted to read, and why she had been so fixated on time. She had been establishing her alibi. She wanted Helen to be able to tell the police where Alice was, and what Alice was doing, every minute until midnight.
Alice knew she would need an alibi because she knew Ronnie was going to kill Olivia Barnes that night. She knew Ronnie would kill Olivia that particular evening, at that particular time, because Alice had persuaded her to do it. That was the story Ronnie had confided in Helen in choked sobs, as she crouched beneath the honeysuckle seven years ago, and Helen had never doubted it for a minute.
35.
Alice curled her fingers through the gaps of the chain-link fence and pressed her face close enough to feel the metal on her cheek, yet there was very little to see from this vantage point. Here, at the north end of the swim club property, there was a basketball court and an old shuffleboard court, but these areas were deserted after sunset. The pool sat on higher ground, beyond this neglected little valley, and the clubhouse was even farther away. But with nothing to see, there was no risk of being seen, which was why Alice had chosen this spot for her almost nightly visits.
There was plenty to hear, especially on an evening like this, when the pool’s teenagers were having a dance party, their monthly reward for all those fifteen-minute increments surrendered to adult swim. Water and concrete combined to send strangely pure sounds to Alice, snatches of conversation and music, the thumping bass lines beneath the songs. “I told you to stop.” “Diane thinks she’s so in demand, but she’s so not.” “We had to drive to D.C. to find the right ones.” The chatter was female, while the bursts of shouts and laughter were male.