What The Dead Know

effete.

“ Four A.M.?” he murmured. “And here it is only noon. You must be exhausted.”

“I have a six-month-old son. Exhausted is my natural state. Actually, I got four straight hours, so I feel relatively well rested.”

Willoughby pretended to study the papers in front of him, but he didn’t want to focus, didn’t want to surrender to those red and blue sirens. There was a whirlpool beneath this placid assortment of old facts. He had no desire to get sucked into this again, to think about all the ways he had failed. Not that anyone had ever rebuked him or suggested he was at fault in any way. His superiors, much as they had wanted a resolution in the Bethany matter-and that was the word they had come to use over time, matter-understood that it was bad luck, one of those rare cases that could have come straight from The Twilight Zone. Not even Dave, in the end, had faulted him. And by the time Willoughby left the department, he had in many ways carved out the image he’d wanted. One of the guys. Tough. Dogged. Never soft, much less effete.

Yet it had long gnawed at him that he’d never made significant inroads into learning what happened to the Bethany girls. And now here was this young woman-gosh, she was pretty, and a new mother, too, imagine that- telling him that a police had been accused, one of their own. One of his own, practically a contemporary. He didn’t remember Stan Dunham, and this Nancy girl said he had retired from the theft division in 1974, but still: This would be so embarrassing. He knew how it would look, if the Jane Doe girl-the woman-was telling the truth. Right under their own noses, all these years. There might be suggestions of a cover-up, a conspiracy. People loved conspiracies.

“This,” he said, pointing his finger at a line in blue ink, a line that had been capitalized and highlighted. “You got it. This is what you want. Only a very few people could talk about this in any detail-me, Miriam, Dave, the young cop who was with us that night, whoever had access to the evidence room.”

“That’s not a small number of people. Plus, the accused is a police, someone who might have had sources inside the department.”

“You’re thinking she’s not who she says she is, but that Stan still might be involved.”

“Everything’s in play right now. Information, it’s-” She paused, gathering her thoughts. “It’s alive, in its own way. It grows, it changes. Since I started working cold cases and spending more and more time with case files and computers, I think about information differently. It’s like a Lego set, you know? There are different ways to put it together, but some pieces will never join, no matter how you pound on them.”

The tea on the table between them had grown cold, but he took a sip anyway. He had insisted on making the tea, injecting a lot of ceremony into two mugs and two bags of Lipton, and she had indulged him in his wish, probably thinking he was lonely and wanted to draw out the visit. He wasn’t lonely, far from it, and he didn’t want her to stay one minute longer than necessary. His eyes slid toward his wife’s old desk and he heard a bird’s mournful coo somewhere in the eaves of Edenwald. Too late. Too late.

“The thing about this,” Willoughby said, “is that the person who took the girls doesn’t necessarily know about it and almost certainly doesn’t remember it. It wouldn’t have mattered to him. But a girl-a girl would remember it. You would, wouldn’t you? At that age?”

“Well, I was more of a tomboy, as you might guess, but yeah, I would remember.”

“So work your way to that. Get her good and drunk on her own words. That’s all you need to do. But you know that, right? You say you were in homicide, before your maternity leave.” He found himself blushing, as if it were impolite to remind this woman that she had bodily functions, that she had reproduced. “You know your way around an interrogation. In fact, I bet you’re darn good at it.”

It was her turn to drink cold tea, to stall a little. When he was younger, he might not have been drawn to her. In his twenties he had liked the women of his class, as his own snobbish mother might have said, the thin-to-the- point-of-brittle women, Katharine Hepburn types, with those pelvis-forward walks and hips that could cut you. Evelyn had been such a woman, elegant at every angle. But softness had its virtues, and this Nancy Porter had such a doll-like face, with those red cheeks and pale blue eyes. Peasant stock, his mother would have said, but his family tree could have used some sturdier genes.

“We thought-they thought-Sergeant Lenhardt, who supervises Infante, and the commissioner himself-we thought you should be present.”

“Watching, you mean?”

“Maybe even…talking.”

“Is that legal?”

“Sometimes retired police still work for the department. Sort of a noncommissioned, consultancy gig. We could make that happen.”

“Dear-”

“ Nancy .”

“I wasn’t being a sexist-I lost your name for a second and was trying to cover up. That’s how it works, don’t you see? I’m in my sixties. I forget things. I’m not as sharp as I was. I don’t remember every detail. Right now you know this case better than I do. I have nothing to contribute.”

“Just your presence might make her think twice about trying to fake us out. With Infante in Georgia and the mother due to arrive tonight-”

“Miriam is coming? You found Miriam?”

“In Mexico, just as you said. She kept a bank account in Texas, and we got the contact info from them. Lenhardt found her last night, but we never thought she’d get here so fast. He tried to talk her out of coming at all. She’ll have to travel all day, but once she’s here, I don’t see how we can keep her away. It wasn’t our idea to sit down today, but my boss says it may be an opportunity, after all.”

“You mean, if she’s a fake, she may fool Miriam and begin gleaning information from her, almost without her knowing.” He shook his head. “She won’t fool Miriam. No one could fool Miriam about anything.”

“We’re not too worried about that. If it comes to it, we’ll always have epithelial cells. But if we could eliminate her definitively, trip her up on the facts, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.”

“Epi…?”

“DNA. I’m just being fancy using a scientific term, and not even accurately.”

“DNA. Of course. The policeman’s new best friend.” He took another sip of cold tea. So Miriam hadn’t told them, and they hadn’t asked. She assumed and they assumed, and why wouldn’t they? Things had gone unsaid, inferences had been made. His fault, he supposed, and he had considered undoing it so many times over the years. But he had owed Dave that much.

He pushed the papers away with enough force that some skidded off the slick surface of his mahogany coffee table. A table that, he noticed now, in the presence of this vibrant young woman, was dusty and overwaxed.

“You can’t imagine being through with something like this, can you? You think the juices can always be engaged. The old cliche is that warhorses react when they smell smoke. But does that mean the horse wants to go to war or that he wants to avoid it? I’ve always thought it might be the latter. I did some good work as a detective. When I retired, I made peace with the fact that this one case would remain open, that some things cannot be known. I even-don’t laugh-thought about supernatural explanations. Alien abductions. Why not?”

“But if there are answers to be had…”

“In my gut I feel that this is going to prove to be a hoax, an ugly waste of everyone’s time and energy. I grieve for Miriam, flying back here, being forced to contemplate the one thing she seldom allowed herself to believe. Dave was the one who clung to hope, and it killed him. It was Miriam who could accept reality, who found a way to survive and get on with her life, diminished as it was.”

“Your gut-that’s what we need. In the room with me, making eye contact with her. The commissioner says he’ll talk to you further about this, if it will make a difference.”

Willoughby walked to the window. It was overcast and cool, even by March’s temperamental standards. Still, he could play golf if he wanted to. Golf, the game one never perfects, the game that reminds you every time how human you are, how flawed. He had always said he would never play, never be drawn into the country-club life