What The Dead Know

“I would have come anyway,” she told them. “Once I heard the detail about the purse. True, I wish your information were more…definitive at this point, that you knew one way or the other. But even if this isn’t my daughter, she clearly knows something about the day my daughters disappeared. Perhaps everything. Where do we go from here?”

“We’d like to put together a comprehensive biography of your daughter, filled with details that only she could know. The layout of the house, family stories, in-jokes. Anything and everything you can remember.”

“That would take hours, maybe even days.” And break my heart a thousand times over. For thirty years Miriam had understood that she had to share her family’s saddest secrets with investigators-her husband’s failing business, her affair, the roundabout way that Sunny and Heather had come to be their daughters. But she was jealous of the happy memories, the mundane, quotidian details. Those belonged to her and Dave exclusively. “Why don’t you tell me what she’s told you so far, and see if any of that rings false with me? Why won’t you let me see her?”

The female detective, Nancy-it was overwhelming for Miriam, meeting so many new people-flipped through her notes. “She’s been consistent on birthdays, the schools they attended, your address. Thing is, most of that is on the Internet or in news accounts, if a person is inclined to dig deep enough, pony up for the archive searches. At one point, she said something about vacations to Florida and a person named Bop-Bop-”

“That’s right. Dave’s mother. She coined that hideous name for herself because she couldn’t bear to be anything matronly. She hadn’t enjoyed being a mother and being a grandmother really discomfited her.”

“But that’s not exactly proprietary, is it? Heather could have told that to kids at school, for example.”

“Yet would it be remembered thirty years later?” Miriam asked, then answered her own question. “Certainly you wouldn’t forget Bop-Bop if you ever met her. She was a piece of work.”

Willoughby smiled.

“What, Chet?” Miriam asked, sharper than she intended. “What’s so amusing to you?”

He shook his head, not wanting to say anything, but Miriam caught his gaze and held it. She shouldn’t be the only person answering questions this morning.

“You’re just so very much as I remembered. The…candor. That hasn’t changed.”

“Gotten worse, I would think, now that I’m an old woman and don’t care what anyone thinks of me. Okay, so this person knows Bop-Bop, she knows what Heather’s purse looks like. Why don’t you believe her, then?”

“Well, there’s the fact that she doesn’t remember seeing the music teacher, when he was adamant that he saw her,” Nancy said. “And in the original notes you told investigators that Heather had a little box in her room where she kept her birthday and Christmas money, but the money-somewhere between forty and sixty dollars, by your recollection-was missing. So Heather took her money to the mall that day, but when we asked for the contents of the purse-”

“The purse was empty when it was discovered.”

“Right. We know that. However, Heather wouldn’t, unless she emptied it herself and threw it down, and no one thinks that happened. This woman didn’t mention it, however. She said there was a little cash, a brush, and a Bonne Belle lip moisturizer because she wasn’t allowed to wear real lipstick then.”

“We didn’t have rules about makeup per se. I told her it looked silly on young girls, but it was her choice. Bonne Belle sounds right, however. Plausible, at any rate.”

Nancy sighed. “Everything she says sounds plausible. At least when she describes the day, what happened. It’s when she describes the abduction and…” Her voice faltered.

“Sunny’s murder,” Miriam prompted. “You have avoided speaking of that part to me.”

“It’s just so lurid,” the young woman said. “Like something out of a movie. The details of the day-what they had for breakfast, how they took the Number Fifteen bus to the mall-again, something that’s in the news accounts, as is the usher who remembered them getting kicked out of Chinatown-those things ring true. But being kidnapped by a cop who takes them to a deserted farmhouse and decides to keep Heather instead of killing her after she witnesses the murder of her sister? When she gets to that part, all the details fall away, and the story no longer rings true.”

“Is it the cop part?” Miriam asked. “Is that what’s so unbelievable?”

To their credit, the four detectives, current and former, did not protest too quickly or readily, did not swear to the heavens that they had found it easy to consider one of their own as a killer and sexual predator. Infante, the handsome one who had picked her up at the airport, spoke first.

“The cop part makes a lot of sense in some ways. That’s how you would lure two girls away-show each one a badge, say you have her sister, that she’s in trouble. Any kid would follow a cop.”

“Maybe not Dave Bethany’s children in 1975-Dave was given to calling police officers pigs, before we found ourselves in their debt, before Chet became a trusted friend.” That was a conscious gift to Chet on her part, a way to make up for the sharpness in her voice earlier. “But okay, I see your point.”

“It’s just this particular cop, it doesn’t really track,” Infante continued. “He was in the theft division, a good guy, well liked. None of us knew him, but the guys who did are stunned by the idea that he could be involved in this. Plus, he’s not even sentient, so he’s an awfully convenient target.”

“Dunham,” Miriam said. “Dunham. Stan, you said?”

“Yes, and the son’s name was Tony. Does the name mean anything to you?”

“Dunham rings a bell. We knew someone named Dunham.”

“Not anyone you ever told me about,” Chet began, his voice defensive. She put her hand on his forearm, wanting to comfort him, but also keen that he stop talking, so she could follow this train of thought.

“Dunham. Dunham. Dunned by Dunham.” Miriam had a vision of herself at the old kitchen table in the house on Algonquin Lane. It was a rickety thing, a not-quite antique, passed down from Bop-Bop’s apartment when she left Baltimore. Foisted on them, Miriam would have said, more stuff for the house with too much stuff. There had been days when she felt she couldn’t walk across a room without bumping into a table or a footstool or some other object that Dave had dragged in. Dave had painted the table with taxicab-yellow lacquer and let the girls affix flower decals to it, which had looked good for all of two weeks, and then the decals had started to peel, leaving behind a sticky residue and pulling up bits of the paint. The green of the checkbook clashed horribly. Or maybe it just seemed that way because she was anxious when she paid their bills each month, watching them go a little further into the hole, playing the game of which creditor to appease this month, which one to let go a little longer. They had argued about expenses, but they could never agree on what was truly expendable. “Ghee costs nothing,” Dave would say if Miriam suggested that the Fivefold Path was a practice the household could no longer afford. “Why can’t you run her to and from school?” She would counter, “I have a job now, a job this family needs. I can’t drop everything to chauffeur Sunny back and forth.”

You could do the mornings… But who would do the afternoons?… The guy is screwing us anyway, reversing the route in the afternoon… We have to find some way to cut our budget.

It was an argument they had almost every month that year, and Miriam had prevailed every month, once again making out the check to Mercer Transportation, up in Glen Rock, Pennsylvania. She hadn’t even known where Glen Rock was. But when the checks came back, they were endorsed by-

“Stan Dunham owned the private bus company, Mercer, that we used to get Sunny to and from junior high every day.”

“Mercer owned the property,” the girl all but yelped. “It was an LLC, the previous owner before the development went in. I thought Dunham sold it to Mercer, but he must have simply transferred the deed to his own LLC. Shit, I can’t believe I missed that.”

“But we looked at the driver,” Chet said. “It was one of the first people we checked out, and he had a solid alibi for the day the girls went missing. Stan wasn’t the driver. You never told me about Stan.”

Miriam understood his frustration, for she felt it, too. No one had been sacred in their search for the girls, no one had been presumed innocent. They had turned their life upside down and inside out, looking for names and connections. Relatives, neighbors, teachers had been considered, whether they knew it or not. Employees at Security Square had been checked for minor sex charges, then brought in to talk to police, as if trafficking with a prostitute necessarily led to kidnapping two adolescent girls. Her coworkers, Dave’s associates. They had even tracked down the man who drove the Number 15 bus route that day, the man Miriam always thought of as the one