“Will we still…talk?”
“Of course. Anytime. Hell, I’ll be keeping tabs, don’t think that I won’t.”
“Okay,” he said.
“I have to be politic, of course. Can’t breathe down the new guy’s neck too much. But this case will always belong to me. It’s one of the two closest to my heart.”
“One of two?” Dave couldn’t help himself. He was shocked to hear that any other case had a claim on Willoughby ’s attention.
“The other one was solved,” Willoughby said quickly. “Long ago. That one was about…good police work, in the face of difficult odds. It doesn’t compare.”
“Yes, I can see how a case that centered on good police work wouldn’t compare to mine.”
“Dave.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just today. That today is today, that day. Fourteen years, and not even a bum lead, a wisp of a rumor, in the last two. I still don’t know how to do this, Chet.”
“This” being everything-not just his status as a perpetual victim of a crime that had never been delineated but his very existence. He had learned how to go on, because that phrase denoted a long, trudging trip to nowhere, pure inertia. Going on was easy. But he had long ago forgotten how to be. For the first time in years, he thought of his friends in the Fivefold Path, the ritual burning and meditation that he had abandoned because he could no longer pretend that he lived in any moment. In Alice ’s Wonderland, the rule was jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today. In Dave’s world, there was no today, only yesterday and tomorrow.
“No one’s equipped for what you’ve been through, Dave. Not even a police. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but-the file’s been in my house more often than not. Now, in light of my retirement…it has to go back, but it will always be in my head. You have my promise. I’ll be here for you. Not just today, not just this day. Every day for the rest of my life. Even when I retire-retire, it will be around here. I won’t go to Florida or Arizona. I’ll be here.”
The detective’s words had placated him, at least superficially. But Dave had been spoiling for a fight all the morning, and the mood didn’t dissipate. The Steinberg case had made him crazy since it hit the headlines eighteen months earlier, and last week’s sentencing had dredged up all those feelings again. Any story of child abuse or neglect by parents made Dave insane. Lisa Steinberg had been killed two weeks after the little girl in Texas, Jessica, had fallen into the well, and Dave had been angry about that, too. Where were the parents? His experience, strange to say, had made him less empathetic. He picked apart others as they had picked him apart. Adam Walsh, Etan Patz, the whole sad strange fraternity of bereavement-he wanted nothing to do with it.
WIND CHIMES SANG as he entered the store, now known simply as TBG-or, as the low-key, lowercase sign had it, tbg. When he made the switch, he thought about trying to use the entire name-tmwtbg-but even he could see that it was a mouthful. The clothing section of the store now took up as much space as the folk art. It had become the very type of store that Miriam had nagged him into trying, much more accessible. It was a raging success. He hated it.
“Hey, boss,” said Pepper, his current manager, a breezy young woman with thirteen hoops in her left earlobe and dark hair that had been razor-cut in the back yet kept long in the front, so long it fell into her eyes. She was Windexing the display cases. Pepper could not have been more proprietary about the store if it were her own, and Dave had yet to figure out what had made her so responsible at such a young age. She had a talent for deflection, a way of avoiding revelation. Dave had the same tendency, but he knew what had formed his temperament. Pepper might have known pain and heartache, but he could not imagine that this sunny, wholesome young woman-despite the hair, those thirteen hoops, she was a fresh-faced, all-American type-had anything truly tragic in her past. He’d thought about asking Willoughby to do a more thorough background check on her, claiming the pretext that he thought she might have sought employment with him because she knew someone or something connected to his girls’ disappearance. But he had never misused his daughters that way, and he didn’t want to start.
Pepper was beautiful, too, the kind of young woman noticed by the reluctant boyfriends and husbands dragged into the store. But Dave saw this only in the abstract. Whenever he met a woman, he estimated her age relative to what his daughters would be, and if she weren’t at least fifteen years older, he wanted nothing to do with her. Sunny would have turned twenty-nine this year, he thought with a pang. Therefore, he wouldn’t consider a woman of less than forty-five. Which should have been good news for the middle-aged women of Baltimore -a successful, available man who would never want a younger woman-except that Dave’s relationships never worked. It had become common to speak of one’s past as baggage, but Dave’s past was so much larger, so much more burdensome, that it could never be understood as a single object that he dragged behind him. His past was like riding a monster with a lashing tail. He clung to it reluctantly, knowing that he would be crushed by its heedless feet if he ever relinquished his grip.
It was a quiet morning, so he went over the books with Pepper, taking her deeper into the workings of tbg than any previous employee had been allowed. He reminded her of the spring craft show, asked if she would like to be his representative there. She squealed, actually squealed, and bit a knuckle in delight.
“But you’d be with me, right? I’d be scared, making those choices all alone.”
“I think you can do it. You have a great eye, Pepper. Just the way you display things, your attention to the store’s look-I swear, even when I buy a dud, you find a way to make people want it.”
“The kind of things we sell-they’re dreams, you know? Visions of what people want to be. No one needs anything we stock, even the clothes. So you have to group them to tell a story. I don’t know, I’m sure I sound crazy-”
“You make perfect sense. Before I hired you, I seldom took a day off. Now I’m capable of being away from the store for up to, oh, twenty minutes at a time.”
Dave’s workaholism was an old, familiar joke between them, and Pepper whooped with delight, a loud, raucous sound that made him wince. She did not know what day it was. She probably didn’t know that Dave Bethany had ever had two daughters, much less what happened to them. True, their images lived in a silver frame in the back room, on his desk, but Pepper never asked questions. She was not incurious, he believed, merely careful about delving too far into his past, lest he expect the same privilege in return. He really liked Pepper. He wished he could love her, or feel fatherly toward her, but that could never happen. Even if Pepper had been less reticent, he never would have allowed himself to feel paternal toward any young woman. In the past fourteen years, Dave had had lovers, women in his bed. But he never considered marrying again, and he had no desire to create daughters out of strangers. Pepper was his employee, nothing more.
OF COURSE, PEOPLE gossiped that she was more, later on. The next day, when emergency workers cut Dave down from an old elm tree behind his house, from the very branch where the tire swing had hung until the rope finally rotted away, they found a note directing them to a pile of papers on his desk, in the study where he had once chanted as the ghee burned at sunrise and sunset. No one needs the things we sell, Pepper had said, so you have to group them to tell a story. Dave hoped his groupings-his body, his papers, the balanced checkbook, the achingly neat house-would be understood. His letter might not be an official will, but its intentions were plain enough. He wanted Pepper to take over his business, while all his other assets, including those derived from the sale of the house, should be put in trust for the daughters that everyone else presumed dead, then released to certain charities in 2009.