What The Dead Know

the front steps after I sassed him. When I found out that his father had paid for an annuity for some other woman, I thought I should come visit her, see what she went through that was worth getting money from the Dunhams. Because the only thing Tony’s ever given me is a promise that he’ll hunt me down and kill me if I ever leave him. He’s after me now. You have to help me, or I’ll go to the authorities, tell them what I know about you. You covered up a murder, and that’s as good as being a murderer.”

It had taken the better part of three days, but she used the methods that Stan Dunham had taught her long ago and found Penelope a new name, then obtained the documents she needed to create a new life. She also had taken five thousand dollars from her savings account and given it to Penelope, who then booked a flight to Seattle out of Baltimore-Washington International. She had begged Penelope to pick another airline, one that flew out of Dulles or National, but Penelope was adamant about using Southwest. “You build up credits for free tickets with them really fast. Rapid Rewards, they call it.”

So for the first time in almost twenty-five years, Sunny had crossed the Potomac and headed into Maryland, then up the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. “Keep the car if you want it,” Penelope said, but Sunny couldn’t imagine doing that. How could she explain some old junker with North Carolina tags? Her plan was to park it at the airport and take a train back into D.C., the Metro the rest of the way home. But, having come so close to home, she couldn’t see the harm in going a few miles north, then doubling back. As she got closer to Route 70, she began to think about visiting Stan, something she had never dared, no matter how ill he became, because a visit would mean signing in, leaving tracks. But Penelope had said he was bad, demented and nearly dead. If they didn’t ask for ID, she could give them a fake name. Or perhaps she could go drive past Algonquin Lane, see if it really was the cherished home of her dreams or merely a ramshackle farmhouse in a not-great corner of Baltimore.

And then the car had slipped away from her, her life had slipped away from her, and in her panic and confusion she’d begun to tell the truth, only to regret it instantly. “I’m one of the Bethany girls.” If she told them everything else, they would bring back Tony and make her admit to the world that her sister’s death was her fault. Besides, who knew what lies Tony would tell, what violence he might do to her? So she blamed everything on Stan, knowing he was safe in his own way, and said she was Heather Bethany. Heather, who had never done anything worse than snoop and spy on an older sister. Their resemblance had always been profound, and there was nothing about Heather’s life that Sunny didn’t know. It should have been easy, being Heather.

The moment she heard that Miriam was alive, she knew she would be exposed. Still, she tried to brazen it out, tried to give them plausible answers so she could slip away before Miriam arrived. Irene was dead and Stan was beyond the reach of any form of justice. If she had known all along that Tony was dead, she might not have hesitated to tell the whole story. But Penelope Jackson had said that Tony was alive, that she needed money because he was determined to hunt her down and make her miserable for leaving him. Penelope had all but said it was Sunny’s fault that Tony remained in the world, still hurting women, and wasn’t that true? If she had called the police that night, in the motel. If she had just started screaming, bringing the other guests, the manager. But she had been scared and silent, wanting to believe there was a way to avoid telling her parents that Heather was dead-and it was her fault. “Look after your sister,” her father had said. “One day your mother and I will be gone, and you’ll be all you have.” It hadn’t worked out that way.

“BUT-” MIRIAM BEGAN, then stopped, her voice faltering as if the task before her was impossible, as if there were so many questions still to be asked that she could never choose just one. Sunny thought of all the things that mothers ask, day in, day out. Where have you been? What did you do? What happened in school today? She remembered how she had begun to chafe at her mother’s curiosity when ninth grade started and she met Tony, how she had learned to hide all her emotions and secrets behind the laconic wall of adolescence. Nowhere. Nothing. Nothing. Now she would gladly answer anything her mother asked, if only her mother could figure out what it was she wanted to know. Sunny decided to offer the simplest and most private information she had, the very thing that she had been so reluctant to give up, believing it to be the last thing, the only thing, that belonged to her.

“I’m an IT person for an insurance company in Reston, Virginia. I use the name Cameron Heinz, but everyone at work calls me Ketch.”

“Catch?”

“Ketch, short for Ketchup. Heinz, get it? She was killed in Florida, back in the mid-sixties, in a fire. Fires are always good. I just want to be that person again. But I want to be Sunny, too, and spend time with you, now that I know you’re alive. Is there any way I can do both? I’ve been the wrong person for so long, can’t I be the right person again, without anyone knowing?”

Lenhardt said, “I think there is if you’re capable of a little deceit.”

“I think I’ve proved,” Sunny said, “that I’m capable of far more than just a little deceit.”

TWO WEEKS LATER the Baltimore County Police Department released a statement that the bones of Heather Bethany had been discovered by cadaver dogs in Glen Rock, Pennsylvania. This was an out-and-out lie, and it amused Lenhardt no end how easily the reporters and the public swallowed it-cadaver dogs discovering thirty- year-old bones, which were identified quickly and automatically, as if there were no DNA backlogs, as if the theoretical possibilities of science could trump the day-to-day realities of overburdened bureaucracies and slashed state budgets. They said they had been able to identify the grave site with information developed from a confidential informant. This was technically true, if one considered Cameron Heinz a confidential informant, a person different and apart from Sunny Bethany. Police had determined that her killer was Tony Dunham and that his parents had entered into an active conspiracy to suppress his crime and hold hostage the surviving sister, Sunny. She had escaped from the family at an undisclosed time and was still alive, living under a different name. Through her lawyer, Gloria Bustamante, Sunny asked that reporters respect her privacy, grant her the anonymity that would be given to any sexual-assault victim. She had no desire to speak of what had happened. At any rate, said Gloria, who adored talking to reporters, her client was living in a foreign country, as was her only surviving relative, her mother.

“True enough,” Lenhardt later said to Infante. “ Reston, Virginia, is a fucking foreign country as far as I’m concerned. Ever seen that place, with all those office parks and high-rises? Anyone could disappear down there.”

“Anyone could disappear anywhere,” Infante said.

After all, Sunny Bethany had done just that, for more than thirty years-as a student in a parish school, as a Swiss Colony salesgirl, as a classified-ad clerk at a small newspaper, as an IT person in a large computer firm. Like a bird who moved into abandoned nests, she had inhabited the lives of long-dead girls, counting on no one to see her, and the world had been almost too eager to grant her that privilege. She was, by design, one of the anonymous women who streamed through streets and malls and office buildings every day-attractive enough, worth a second look, yet deflecting all attention. Would Infante, champion cataloger of women, have noticed her, in any of her guises? Probably not. Yet now that he bothered to look, really look, he realized that Sunny’s face was remarkably close to the computer projection of how Sunny Bethany would have aged, although the forecast had erred a little on the wrinkly side, creating pronounced crow’s-feet and deep grooves on either side of her mouth. She could have passed for five, ten years younger if she pushed it. But she had settled for a mere three.

Go figure , Infante thought, closing the computer window that contained the likenesses of the two sisters, Sunny Bethany has no laugh lines .

PART X. SWADHAYAYA