What The Dead Know

was made from scratch. Burgers like that took longer, but they were worth it. In fact, diners were the only place her father ever ate burgers. Even a health nut, he said, had to let loose every now and then. He had made them chocolate-chip pancakes that morning, and she hadn’t finished hers. She wished she had. She wished she could go back to this morning, but that was impossible. Still, she could go home. She would go back to the room, ask Tony to take them home, come up with a lie and persuade Heather to back her up, bribing her with her own money.

She paid for the cheeseburgers, never guessing that her life had ended while she waited in the New Ideal Diner.

WHEN SUNNY RETURNED to the room, Heather was lying on the floor, not moving. An accident, Tony said. She was jumping on the bed making all this noise and I told her to stop, tried to grab her arm, and she fell.

“We have to call a doctor or take her to a hospital. Maybe she’s not really dead.” Hopeless words, said over the body of a clearly dead Heather, the back of her head as collapsed as a pumpkin the day after Halloween, blood seeping into a towel beneath her once-blond hair. Why had he put a towel beneath her head? And how do you hit your head so hard falling off a bed? But those were questions Sunny would not even dare to consider for several years.

“No,” Tony said. “She’s dead. We should call my dad. He’ll know what to do.”

STAN DUNHAM WAS far kinder than the tyrant described by his son over those months of confessional talks on the bus. He did not yell, or scream, or say, as Sunny’s mother often did, What were you thinking, Sunny? Why didn’t you use your head? Sunny could see how he might be strict, but not scary, never scary. If you were in real trouble, you would want to talk to someone like Stan Dunham.

“This is the way I see it,” he said, sitting on the motel double bed, his hands on his knees. “We have lost one life, and we can’t get it back. If we call the authorities, my son will be arrested and charged. No one will believe it was an accident. And Sunny will have to live the rest of her life with parents who will blame her for the death of her sister.”

“But I didn’t…” she protested. “I wasn’t-”

He held up a hand, and Sunny fell silent. “It will be hard for your parents to think otherwise. Can’t you see that? Parents are human, too. They won’t want to hate you, but they will. I know. I’m a parent.”

She bowed her head, out of arguments.

“But here’s how I see it, Sunny? I’m right, it’s Sunny, isn’t it? You and Tony made a plan. I’m not sure if Tony knew that a fifteen-year-old girl can’t marry without her parents’ consent in this state”-he shot his son a look-“but this was your plan, and we’re going to see it through. That’s honorable, doing what you said you were going to do. You’ll come live with us, under a new name. At home you can be Tony’s wife, just like you planned. You’ll share a room, even. I’m okay with that. Outside the house, you’ll have to go to school for a while, be someone else. And when you’re old enough, you can have a proper wedding. I’ll work it out. I’ll make everything work. You have my word.”

With that he lifted Heather as any father might pick up a sleeping child, cradling her broken head and arranging her over his shoulder, then carrying her out to his car, telling Sunny to follow him. To her amazement she did-into the car, into another life, another world, where she would not have to be the girl who had caused her sister’s death. Tony was to stay behind and clean the room, then spend the night there as planned, in order to keep people at the motel from becoming suspicious about events in room 249. Tony never meant to marry me, Sunny admitted to herself, sitting in Stan Dunham’s car, her sister’s body in his trunk. He was going to take her to this ugly motel off the highway, have sex with her, then return her home, counting on her shame and embarrassment to keep her from telling anyone.

It probably would have worked, too. She would have gone back to Algonquin Lane, concocted some story about what had happened, why she’d gone missing for several hours. But she couldn’t go home now, not without Heather. Mr. Dunham was right. They would never forgive her. She would never forgive herself.

THEY CALLED HER Ruth, told people that she was a distant cousin, unknown to them before the fire that had killed her family. Outside the house that’s all she was, a distant cousin who may or may not have been falling in love with her newfound boy-cousin, but she was Tony’s wife from the day she crossed the threshold. She shared Tony’s bed-and quickly discovered she didn’t enjoy it. The sweetness, the compliments from their time on the bus-those were gone, replaced by an urgent, not-quite-brutal sex notable primarily for its brevity. When she felt wistful for home, when she dared to say that perhaps she should go back, that there must be a way, Stan Dunham told her that she had no home. Her parents had broken up and drifted away. Her father was a failure, her mother an adulterer. Besides, she was an accessory now, someone who had helped to cover up a crime, and she would be charged if she came forward. “I used to be a police,” he said. “I know what’s happening with the investigation. You’re better off with us.”

It did not escape her that the Dunhams were the kind of family for which she had yearned in recent years. Normal, she would have called them, with a father who had a real job and a mother who stayed home and baked, tying bright aprons over her dresses. Irene Dunham seemed to have more aprons than dresses, in fact, and she baked every day of the week. Her piecrust was famous, she told Sunny, bragging on herself with a self-satisfied air that Irene found unacceptable in others. But her pie, for all the prizes it had won, was dust in Sunny’s mouth, and she never finished a slice. Irene didn’t seem to care for Sunny much, blaming her for everything that happened, standing by her son no matter what he did.

As Sunny got older, she sometimes tried to say no to Tony when he wanted sex, and he would hit her, blackening her eye on one occasion, dislocating her jaw another, punching her so hard in the stomach that she thought she might never breathe again. And one time, the last time, just about killing her. Admittedly, this was after she had struck him with the poker from the living-room fireplace, the same poker she had used to break the heads on Irene’s beloved dolls.

This was their official wedding night.

It was almost midnight, and the elder Dunhams were asleep as usual, but for once they couldn’t ignore the noises coming from Tony’s bedroom. Irene Dunham had gone straight to her son’s side, although he had nothing more than a bright red line of blood across his cheek, the one blow that she had landed before he pulled the poker from her and began beating her, then kicking her. Stan Dunham had gone to her, however, and in the moment that he reached for her and their eyes met, Sunny saw that he knew, had always known. He understood that his son had killed Heather, that her death was not an accident. She hadn’t fallen and hit her head. Tony had beaten her, or thrown her to the floor and pounded her head until it broke. Why? Who knows? He was a violent, frustrated man. Heather was a mouthy little girl who had ruined his plan. Perhaps that was reason enough. Perhaps there could never be reasons enough for what he’d done.

“You have to leave,” Stan Dunham told her, and if his family heard his words as a punishment, an exile, she knew he was trying to save her. The next day, he found a new name for her, taught her the trick of disappearing into a little dead girl’s unclaimed identity. “Someone born about the right time, who died before getting a Social Security card, that’s what you want.” He bought her a bus ticket and told her that he would always be there for her, and Stan Dunham was nothing if not true to his word. When she was twenty-five and decided she wanted to learn how to drive, he had come down to Virginia on weekends and patiently guided her through empty school parking lots. When she decided, back in 1989, that she wanted the training necessary to get hired on as a proper computer tech, he had underwritten it. When Irene died and Stan no longer had to worry about his wife’s grudging oversight, he purchased an annuity for Sunny. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it helped her make car payments and, lately, deposits to her savings account, which she hoped to use for a condo if the real-estate market ever cooled down.

It was only when Penelope Jackson showed up on her doorstep a week ago to the day that Sunny learned that Tony Dunham had an annuity, too. And that, when drunk, he had spoken of his crimes and his early marriage, telling Penelope that she would never get away from him because he had once killed a girl and covered it up, with the help of his father and the girl’s very own sister.

“Here’s where he grabbed out a square inch of my hair,” Penelope said, showing a bald patch behind her ear. Then, tapping on a large, grayish front tooth, “This is a bond, and not a good one at that. Fucker pushed me down