“At this point it’s going to come down to an arrest,” Willoughby had said as the day wore on and more holes were dug, and the detective gave up on the enterprise in progress. “Someone who knows something and will want to use it as a bartering chip. Or perhaps the guy himself. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s already in custody for another crime. There are lots of unsolved cases that have gotten all the publicity in the world-Etan Patz, Adam Walsh.”
“They came after,” Dave said, as if this were an issue of primogeniture. “And Adam Walsh’s parents at least have a body.”
“They have a head,” Willoughby said, his pedantic nature coming to the fore. “They never found the body.”
“You know what? I’d kill for a head at this point.”
The call about that Finksburg farm had been so promising. For one thing, it had come from a woman, and while women in general were no more sane than men, they did not have the kind of craziness that sought release in taunting the family of two presumed murder victims. Besides, this was a neighbor, a woman who had provided her full name. A man named Lyman Tanner had moved to the area in the spring of 1975, just before the girls disappeared. She recalled him washing his car very early on Easter Sunday, the day after the girls disappeared, which struck her as odd, because rain was in the forecast.
She had been asked, Willoughby reported back to Dave, why she would remember such a detail eight years later.
“Simple,” said the woman, Yvonne Yepletsky. “I’m Orthodox-Romanian Orthodox, but I go to the Greek Orthodox church downtown, like most of the Romanian Orthodox. On our calendar Easter falls on a different day, and my mother used to say it always rains on their Easter. And sure enough it usually does.”
Still, the oddness of that car wash did not come back to her until a few months ago, when Lyman Tanner died and left his farm to some distant relatives. Yvonne Yepletsky remembered then that her neighbor had worked at Social Security, so close to the mall, and that he had seemed unusually interested in her own daughters, young teenagers when he first moved in next door. He hadn’t even minded the old graveyard bordering his property, which had deterred so many other buyers.
“And he made a big to-do about putting in crops, rented a tractor and all to till up the field, but then he never done nothing with it,” Mrs. Yepletsky said.
The Baltimore County Police Department hired a bulldozer.
The crew was on its twelfth hole when another neighbor helpfully informed them that Mrs. Yepletsky was disgruntled because her husband wanted to buy the land and Tanner’s heirs wouldn’t sell. The Yepletskys weren’t liars, not quite. They had come to believe the stories they told about Tanner. A man whose heirs wouldn’t sell to you for a good price-why, he must be odd. He had washed his car when rain was in the forecast. Wasn’t that about the time those girls had disappeared? He musta done it. Hope, which had moved to Dave’s shoulder for all of a week, settled back on his chest, kneading its claws in and out.
Given that his breakfast consisted solely of black coffee, Dave required only twenty minutes to finish it and the paper, rinse out his cup, and head upstairs to get dressed. It was barely 7:00 A.M. Three hundred and sixty-four days of the year, he kept his daughters’ bedroom doors closed, but he always opened them on this day, allowed himself a little tour. He felt not unlike Bluebeard in reverse. If a woman were to join him in this house-unimaginable to him, but theoretically possible-he would forbid her to enter these rooms. She would, of course, defy him and sneak in behind his back. But instead of discovering the corpses of his previous wives, she would find preserved time capsules of two girls’ lives, April 1975.
In Heather’s pink-and-white room, Max of Where the Wild Things Are circled the world, found the island of the wild things, yet still made it home in time for supper. A few teen idols had crept onto the walls beneath Max, toothy boys all, indistinguishable to Dave’s eyes. Next door, Sunny’s room was very much a teenager’s room, with only one trace of childhood left: a wall hanging, her sixth-grade marine-biology project, for which she had laboriously constructed an underwater scene in cross-stitch. She’d gotten an A for that project, but only after the teacher had interrogated Miriam at length, not trusting that Sunny had done this on her own. How angry Dave had been that someone would doubt his daughter’s talent, her word.
One might expect that the rooms, shut up and untouched, would get dirty and musty, yet Dave found them startlingly fresh and alive. It was reasonable, sitting on the beds in these rooms-and this morning he tried out the beds in both, bold as Goldilocks-to imagine that their owners would return by nightfall. Even the police, who had briefly considered the possibility that the girls were runaways, had conceded that these rooms showed that the occupants expected to return. True, it was odd that Heather had taken all her money to the mall, but perhaps that had been the source of the trouble. There were people who might hurt a child for forty dollars, and the money was not in her purse when it was found.
Of course, the moment the police ruled out the fact that the girls had left on their own, it was Dave’s turn to be the suspect. To this day Willoughby had never acknowledged, much less apologized for, the unfairness and awkwardness of that inquiry, or the vital hours that had been lost in this misdirection. Dave subsequently learned that family members were always suspect in such cases, but the specifics of his life-the crumbling marriage, the failing shop, the college trust funds started by Miriam’s parents-had made the accusation specifically heinous. “You think I killed my children for money?” he asked, all but lunging at Willoughby. The detective hadn’t taken it personally. “I’m not thinking anything just yet,” he said with a shrug. “There are questions, and I’m getting answers. That’s all.”
To this day Dave wasn’t sure what was worse: being suspected of a financial motive in his daughters’ deaths or being accused of killing them to get back at his philandering spouse. Miriam had acted as if she were so noble, spilling her secret to the cops so quickly, but her secret had also provided the perfect alibi for her and her lover. “What if they did it?” Dave asked the police. “What if they did it and framed me, so they could run off together?” But not even he believed that scenario.
He didn’t mind so much that Miriam had left him, but he lost all respect for her when she left Baltimore as well. She had abandoned the vigil. She was not strong enough to live with the kneading, needling hope and the impossible possibilities it whispered in his ear. “They’re dead, Dave,” Miriam said the last time they spoke, over two years ago. “The only thing we have to look forward to is the official discovery of what we know is true. The only thing to cling to is that it’s less horrific than we’ve dared to imagine. That someone took them and shot them, or killed them in a way that involved no suffering. That they weren’t sexually assaulted, that-”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!” Those were almost the last words he ever spoke to Miriam. But neither one of them wanted that. He apologized and she apologized, and those were their last words. Miriam, who had always loved new things, had gotten an answering machine last year. He called sometimes and listened to her outgoing message, but he never left one. He wondered if Miriam listened in on her messages, if she would pick up if she heard his voice on the machine. Probably not.
Under Maryland law he could have petitioned as early as 1981 to have the girls presumed legally dead, a judicial finding that would have freed the money in their college accounts. But he had no interest in their money, less interest still in having a court codify his worst fears. He let the money languish. That would show everyone.