What The Dead Know

“Why would Mommy let you do that?” Sunny had demanded to know.

“Because that’s how babies are made. Besides, it feels good. When you’re a grown-up,” her father had added. “When you’re a grown-up, it feels good to do that, even if it doesn’t make a baby. It’s a very sacred thing, the way you show love.”

“But…but-pee comes out of there. You might have peed inside her.”

“Urine, Sunny. And the penis knows not to do that when it’s inside a woman.”

“How?”

Their father started to explain how the penis grew when it wanted to make a baby, how it had this different kind of liquid inside filled with seed called sperm, until Sunny put her hands over her ears and said, “Eew, I don’t want to know. It could still get confused. It could still pee in there.”

“How big does it get?” Heather wanted to know. Her father had held out his hands, like a man showing the size of a fish he’d caught, but she didn’t believe him.

Given that she knew everything about baby making before she entered kindergarten, Heather was surprised when she got to Dickey Hill Elementary and discovered that sex education was not taught until the sixth grade and it was considered a big deal, requiring permission slips from all the parents. Still, she didn’t brag about her knowledge or draw attention to it. That was another thing that Sunny never understood, that it was good to keep things back, not volunteer everything at once. No one liked a show-off.

In fourth grade, however, Heather’s friend Beth’s mother got pregnant, and Beth’s parents told her that God had put the baby there. Like her father, Heather could not bear to let misinformation stand. She convened a quick class beneath the jungle gym on the playground, recounting everything she knew about baby making. Beth’s parents complained, and Heather’s parents were called to school, but her father was not only unapologetic, he was proud of Heather. “I can’t be held accountable for those who prefer to lie to their children,” he said, right in front of Heather. “And I won’t ask my daughter to say she was wrong for speaking the truth about something natural.”

Natural was good. It was her father’s highest form of praise. Natural fabrics, natural foods, natural hair. After he opened the shop, he had grown his hair into a large, woolly Afro, much to Sunny’s embarrassment. He even combed it with a Black Power pick, one whose handle ended in a clenched fist. He would, in fact, not approve of the Sta-prest pants, which definitely had something unnatural in them to keep them unwrinkled. Yet Heather was sure she could persuade him or her mother to let her have a pair, if she used her birthday money.

She walked toward the Pants Corral. Mr. Pincharelli, Sunny’s music teacher, was playing the organ at Jordan Kitt’s. Sunny once had a crush on him, Heather knew from reading her diary. But the last time they’d come to the mall together, Sunny had hurried by the organ store, as if embarrassed by him. Today he was standing up, playing “Easter Parade” with a lot of energy, and a small crowd had gathered around. Mr. Pincharelli’s face was shiny with sweat, and there were pit stains along the underarm seams of his short-sleeved dress shirt. Heather couldn’t imagine having a crush on him. If he were her music teacher, she never would have stopped making fun of him. Yet the crowd seemed genuine in its admiration and enjoyment, and Heather found herself caught up in the mood and she perched on the edge of a nearby fountain. She was puzzling over one of the phrases-you’ll find that you’re in a photo so pure?-when someone grabbed her elbow.

“Hey, you were supposed to-” The voice was angry, not loud, but sharp enough to be heard above the music, so those standing nearby turned and looked. The man dropped her arm quickly, mumbled, “Never mind,” and disappeared back into the throngs of shoppers. Heather watched him go. She was glad she wasn’t the girl that he was looking for. That girl was definitely in trouble.

“Easter Parade” gave way to “Superstar,” a Carpenters song, not the one about Jesus. Just last week Sunny had given Heather all her Carpenters albums, proclaiming them lame. Music was the one area where Sunny’s taste might be worth imitating, and if she thought the Carpenters lame, then Heather wasn’t sure she wanted any part of them either. Five dollars-that was enough to buy an album and still have some left over. Maybe she would go down to Harmony Hut after all, buy something by…Jethro Tull. He seemed pretty cool. And if Sunny happened to be at the record store, too-well, it was a free country.

PART III. THURSDAY

CHAPTER 11

“The thing is,” Infante said to Lenhardt, “she doesn’t look like a Penelope.”

The sergeant bit. “What does a Penelope look like?”

“I dunno. Blond hair. Pink helmet.”

“What?” Drawing it out to two syllables.

“That old cartoon? The one where there was a car race every Saturday and they sucked you into believing that the outcome was somehow unknown? Anyway, Penelope Pit Stop was the name of the pretty one. They hardly ever let her win.”

“It’s Greek, though, right? I mean, not to take anything away from Hanna-Barbera, but I think there’s some famous story about Penelope, something to do with knitting and a dog.”

“What, like Betsy fuckin’ Ross?”

“Slightly before that. Like a few thousand years, asshole.”

Just twenty-four hours ago, when Infante was on the shit list, this conversation would have been completely different-same words, perhaps, but a much less friendly tone. Yesterday Lenhardt would have been up for the same bullshit conversation, but the insults, the digs at Infante’s intelligence, would have been serious, barbed rebukes. Today, however, Infante was a good boy. Two hours of overtime last night, at his desk bright and early, despite having stopped at the impound lot on his way in, and now at his computer, where he had pulled up Penelope Jackson’s North Carolina driver’s-license info and quickly arranged to get a copy of her photo faxed by the state police there.

Lenhardt squinted at the likeness, fuzzy from being enlarged on a photocopier. “So is it her?”

“It could be. Theoretically. The age, thirty-eight, isn’t that far off the mark, although our girl’s claiming older, which you don’t get much. Hair and eye color are consistent. Hair’s long in the photograph, cropped short in real life. The one in the hospital is definitely thinner than this.”

“Women cut their hair all the time,” Lenhardt said, his voice a little wistful, as if this fact made him sad. “And some even manage to drop a few pounds around the time they turn forty, or so I’m told.” Mrs. Lenhardt was a knockout, but a bit on the plump side.

“Still, I don’t think it’s the same face. This one here’s got a look to it. Kind of surly and cunning. The Jane Doe at St. Agnes, she’s softer. I mean, I don’t doubt she’s lying to me-”

“Of course.” Lying was assumed in their line of work.

“But I’m not sure what she’s lying about , or to what purpose. If she isn’t Heather Bethany-if she’s Penelope Jackson or someone else still-then how does she know to bring up this thirty-year-old case when she’s arrested? And how does she have the good fortune to fit the description, more or less?”

Infante pulled up another file on the computer, this one from a national database on missing children. He hadn’t known how to do this, but a quick call to his old partner, Nancy Porter, had pointed the way. Here were the two girls, Heather and Sunny, as they had been at eleven and fourteen, their last school pictures. Below the actual photos were an artist’s interpretations of how those girls might look today.

“She look like that?” Lenhardt asked, tapping the photo of Heather with his index finger-and leaving a little smear on Infante’s screen, right in the middle of the girl’s nose.

“Kinda. Maybe. Yes and no.”

“You been to a reunion, college or high school?”

“Naw. That stuff doesn’t do anything for me. And it’s all the way back on Long Island, where I got no people now.”