“I feel awful,” Willoughby confided over the crackle of the international line, having found Miriam through her former colleagues at the real-estate office. “It was just that day that I-”
“Don’t feel bad, Chet. I don’t. At least, I don’t feel guilty about Dave.”
“Yes, but…” The sentence, while unfinished, still managed to be quite cruel.
“I don’t forget either,” Miriam said. “I just don’t remember in the same way. Which is to say, I don’t wake up every morning and hit myself over the head with a frying pan and wonder why I have a headache, which was Dave’s solution. The pain is there. It will always be there. It doesn’t have to be stoked, or encouraged. Dave and I chose different ways to mourn, but we both mourned equally.”
“I’ve never said otherwise, Miriam.”
“I’m in language school here. Did you know that? I’m learning a new language at the age of fifty-two.”
“I might do something like that,” he offered, but she wasn’t interested in what he was doing. At least Dave pretended to care about me, Willoughby thought.
“In Spanish there’s a whole set of verbs where what would be the object in English becomes the subject. Me falta un tenedor. Literally, ‘The fork is lacking to me,’ not ‘I need a fork.’ Se me cayó. Se me olvidó. ‘It fell from me.’ ‘It forgot itself to me.’ In Spanish it’s understood that things happen to you sometimes.”
“Miriam, I’ve never second-guessed anything you or Dave did to cope.”
“Bullshit, Chet. But you kept your opinion to yourself most of the time, and for that I love you.”
He wished those words-so flippant, so unfelt-didn’t hit him so hard. For that I love you.
“Stay in touch,” he said. “With the department, I mean. If anything should come up-”
“It won’t.”
“Stay in touch,” he repeated, pleaded, knowing all the time that she wouldn’t, not forever.
A few weeks later, the day before his official retirement, he checked the Bethany case file out one more time. When the file was returned, any reference to the girls’ biological parentage had been removed. Dave Bethany had always insisted that this part of the story was a cul-de-sac, a dead end, not unlike Algonquin Lane itself, which backed up to the more civilized edges of Leakin Park, an otherwise unruly bit of wilderness in the middle of the city. In the early days, just after the girls went missing, coarse, curious types drove slowly by the house, their rubbernecking intentions exposed when they had to turn around at the street’s end. Others had come to the store, buying small items to assuage their guilt. How those people had pained Dave, how hurt he had been. “I’m a fucking freak show,” he complained to Chet, more than once. “Take down the license plates,” Chet advised him. “Make a note of the name if they pay by check or credit card. You never know who’s driving by.” And Dave, being Dave, had done just that. Taken down license plates, recorded every hang-up phone call, shook his family’s life as if it were a snow globe, then set it back on the table and waited to see how the tableau might change. But no matter how many times he rearranged it over fourteen years, all the parts sifted back into place-with the exception of Miriam.
PART IX. SUNDAY
CHAPTER 37
“We can lie about the bones,” Infante said.
“But we don’t have any bones,” Lenhardt said. “We can’t find the bones.”
“Exactly.”
Infante, Lenhardt, Nancy, and Willoughby were in the lobby of the Sheraton, waiting to take Miriam Toles to breakfast-a breakfast where they would admit they didn’t have a clue as to the identity of the woman she hoped to meet today, the woman for whom she had traveled over two thousand miles. She could be Miriam’s daughter. Or she could be a brilliant liar who had decided to fuck with everybody’s head for a week or so. To what end? Money? Boredom? Out-and-out insanity? Or was she safeguarding her current identity because that name would pop out a criminal warrant for the person she now was? That was the only thing that made sense to Infante. He didn’t believe for a minute that she was worried about her privacy. From his observation she grooved on attention, enjoyed their every encounter. No, she had something else to hide, and she was concealing it behind Heather Bethany’s identity, using this infamous old murder to distract them.
“We’ve been obsessing over the bones because of all the things they could establish if we had them. The parents aren’t biological, but the sisters are. Right?”
Willoughby nodded. Twenty-four hours ago, according to Nancy, she had to sweet-talk him into watching the interview. Now they couldn’t pry him away and Lenhardt was humoring him, rather than risk hurting his feelings and seeing him on the nightly news. Infante still couldn’t get over how he had screwed with the case file, then all but encouraged them to bring Miriam back to Baltimore before they knew what was what, who was who. What had the guy been thinking? How could he have removed crucial information? No possibility could be ruled out, as far as Infante was concerned. One thing that Nancy had told him about cold cases-the name was always in the files.
“We already told her we didn’t find the bones,” Lenhardt said.
“We told her that we didn’t find them at the address she provided. But I’ve just come back from Georgia, right, where Tony Dunham lived? For all she knows, the son could have dug them up and taken them away before his father sold the property, to prevent their discovery.”
“That would be impressive,” Lenhardt said. “I can’t even get my son to mow the lawn.”
“Seriously-”
“No, I’m hearing you, just trying to think it through. So we tell her we have her sister’s bones. If she’s lying, she capitulates-you think-because she knows she’s going to have to submit to tests, and those will prove she’s not related. But she’s quick on her feet, this one. What if she says: ‘Well, it could be some other body. Who knows how many times Stan Dunham did this, how many girls he killed?’”
“It’s still worth a shot. I’d try anything right now to get an answer as quickly as possible out of her, to put the mother’s mind to rest without making her go through the turmoil of meeting her, talking to her. If we could get her to confess…”
“Well, we’re not going to figure out anything before breakfast,” Lenhardt said, glancing at Willoughby. “We have to tell the mother how up in the air this is. She shouldn’t have come, but I guess I should have known, as a parent, that nothing would hold her back once we called.”
Infante usually hated it when Lenhardt invoked his standing as a parent, especially now that Nancy could nod solemnly, part of the club. But in this case Lenhardt seemed to be trying to mitigate Willoughby ’s guilt, so Infante didn’t mind as much.