What The Dead Know

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.

“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 cayo. Se me olvido. ‘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