What The Dead Know

downtown, but Miriam’s instincts about real estate were always sound. If Dave had heeded her advice, they would have had a far more valuable house in the end, for the values in their little corner of Northwest Baltimore remained flat for years.

And, of course, the girls would be alive.

That was the secret game that Miriam could never stop playing with herself, unhelpful as she knew it to be. Go back into history, change one thing. Not the day itself. That was too obvious, too easy. Their doom was sealed before that day dawned, when Sunny decided to spend the afternoon at the mall and Heather lobbied for permission to join her. But if she could go a little further back, then destiny could be thwarted. If they had put the house on Algonquin Lane up for sale as Miriam had urged, if they had never purchased it at all, then the chain of events could be disrupted. She wondered who owned it now, if the current residents knew of its talent for death. One murder in a house was bad enough, but if a buyer knew the full story of Algonquin Lane…No, not even Miriam could sell that house, and Miriam, in her heyday, could sell almost anything.

Hindsight was twenty-twenty, as the cliche would have it, but not always. After the girls had disappeared, Dave had proved to be even more myopic about their past than he had been about their present. Their problem, their curse, he insisted to neutral third parties, was that they were happy. Life was perfect, and therefore they had to fall. To hear Dave tell it, Algonquin Lane was a veritable Eden, and some unknown force had slithered through their lives and pinned its crimes on them.

The media had bought it, too. People were less cynical then, resources fewer. Today the shock of two missing sisters would have dominated national news channels, an armchair detective story for those lucky parents who knew where their children were. Back then, the girls’ disappearance had been a local story, generating only a passing mention in a Time magazine piece on missing children. More national attention might have helped achieve what Miriam was always careful to think of as a resolution, but she supposed they’d been better off without the intrusion. Nowadays it would probably take a day for an amateur blogger to uncover the nature of Miriam’s alibi, not to mention the debts that were weighing the family down. Thirty years ago the police could keep such secrets, while Equitable Trust had quietly paid off their first and second mortgages. (Children missing and presumed dead? Then you deserve a free house.)

Yet Dave’s version-spin, as it might be called now-had proved to be good for his business, not to mention her own career. Especially in that first year, Miriam could tell when it was her name, more than anything else, that had been the chief factor in attracting a new client. Midway through her spiel, while laying out what she could do for a motivated seller, how the firm could help with financing for pre-qualified buyers, she would catch one of the clients, usually the wife, inspecting her gravely. How do you go on? was the unspoken question. How do you not? was Miriam’s unstated answer. What are my choices?

She sometimes wished Dave could see her now, working in a store not unlike the one he had run. He would appreciate the irony-Miriam, who had so loathed The Man with the Blue Guitar, selling the very same Oaxacan pottery that Dave had tried to persuade middle-class Baltimore to buy long before it was ready for such wares. But she’d needed a job and, although she had little use for the gallery owner’s taste, she liked him immediately. Joe Fleming was a jolly, flamboyantly gay man-when he was talking to customers. But Miriam had known from the moment she met him that it was an act, a cover for something dark and sad. Faux Joe, she called it now. “Here come some customers,” she would call out to him. “Time to put on our faces, the ones we keep in the jars by the door.” “I’ll be right there, Miss Rigby,” Joe replied, exaggerating his Texas drawl. And although Miriam didn’t share Joe’s taste, she was superb at selling the things he stocked. Her secret was that she really didn’t give a shit. With her good posture and her marvelous figure still intact, her dark hair shot through with wiry strands of silver, she had a reserved, cool manner that whipped shoppers into a frenzy of buying, as if this might win her approval, prove their taste equal to hers.

It was quiet in the shop this morning. The snowbirds had started migrating north; the frenzy generated by Easter was still a week away. Miriam had first arrived in San Miguel de Allende in Easter Week 1989, completely by accident. Before, Easter had been a secular holiday to her, more about the baskets that she assembled so painstakingly, the elaborate egg hunts that Dave staged in the yard. Neither one of them had grown up in observant homes; Miriam was “Jewish” and Dave was “Lutheran” in the same way that she was German and he was a Scot. And while many had counseled a return to religion as a way of coping with her grief, Miriam had even less use for it after the girls disappeared. “Faith explains nothing,” she told her parents. “It simply asks you to wait for an explanation that may or may not come after you die.”

But the faith to which Miriam had been exposed was polite, demure. Even the Fivefold Path, as practiced by Dave, was restrained and low-key. In Mexico there was still something savage and outlaw about religion. She wondered if that was a consequence of the years that it had been prohibited, when Catholicism had been driven underground in the 1930s, but that theory wouldn’t come to her until she’d been there several years and immersed herself in books such as Alan Riding’s Distant Neighbors and Graham Greene’s The Lawless Roads. On the day she arrived in San Miguel, she knew only that the crowd had the panting intensity of people waiting for a rock concert, and she joined them out of base curiosity. At last the processional came into view, a startlingly lifelike mannequin of Jesus in a glass coffin, held aloft by women dressed in black and purple. Miriam had been repulsed by Jesus under glass, but liked the fact that it was women who carried him. That was Good Friday. By Easter Sunday, she had decided she wanted to live in San Miguel.

Anniversaries. There was a date, of course, a specific one-March 29, and it would be logical to mourn her daughters on that day. But it was the moving target of the Saturday that fell between Good Friday and Easter Sunday that got to Miriam. It was the day, more than the date, that mattered. It had been foolish to pretend that she was working that day. Even Dave, naive as he was, should have been able to figure out that a real-estate saleswoman, even Baumgarten’s hard-driving number one saleswoman, didn’t have to go into work on Saturday when there were no open houses on Sunday. If only Dave hadn’t ignored all the evidence of a philandering wife, if only he had called her on what she was doing a week or two earlier. But he had probably been scared that she would leave him. To this day, she didn’t know if she would have, not if the children had lived.

Joe arrived late, the owner’s prerogative. “Texans,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder at the window, where a group of tourists were studying the displays skeptically. He hissed the word the way a cowboy might have said “Injuns” in an old-fashioned movie. “Cover me.”

“You’re a Texan,” Miriam reminded him.

“That’s why I can’t deal with them. You take them. I’ll be in the back.”

Miriam watched Joe disappear between the bright curtains that separated the gallery from a workshop in the back. With his red face and huge belly blooming beneath his oxford-cloth shirt, he looked unhealthy, but then he always had. When she met him in 1990, she assumed he had HIV, but his midsection had only grown more and more rotund, while his legs remained stick-thin and wobbly. Faux Joe the Folk Art Ho. They had enjoyed their own don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy from the beginning, maintaining their superficial bonhomie for fifteen years. Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies. Tell me no secrets and I’ll do you the same favor. Once, after a long, drunken dinner party when Joe had been spurned by a young man he’d courted for months, he seemed on the verge of confiding in Miriam, spilling all his secrets. Miriam, sensing his need, had headed off the confession by jumping ahead to the benediction he clearly needed.

“We’re such good friends we don’t need to go into specifics, Joe,” she’d said, patting his hand. “I know. I know. Something bad happened, something you seldom speak of. And you know what? You’re right to keep it inside. Everyone says just the opposite, but they’re wrong. It’s better not to speak of some things. Whatever you’ve done, whatever happened, you don’t need to justify it to me or anyone. You don’t need to justify it even to yourself. Keep it locked up.”

And the next morning, when they met at the gallery, she could tell that Joe was glad for her advice. They were best friends who told each other nothing of significance, and that’s the way it needed to be.

“Is this real silver?” one of the Texans asked, barging through the door and grabbing a bracelet from the window display. “I hear that there are a lot of fakes down here.”

“It’s easy enough to tell,” Miriam said, flipping it to show the woman the stamp that certified it as silver. But she didn’t hand the bracelet back to the woman, her own private technique. She held it as if suddenly reluctant to surrender the object, as if she had just realized she wanted it for herself. A simple trick, but it made the right kind of customer wild to own the thing in hand.

The Texans turned out to be good for a lot of jewelry, which was typical. One of the women, however, had