What The Dead Know Part 17

"She could have gone outside and asked for a refund."

She furrowed her brow, as if considering this. "Yes. Yes. That never occurred to me. I was eleven. And besides, I found out right away why she left. She had sneaked into Chinatown, which was an R-rated movie. The way the lobby was set up-there were only two theaters-it wasn't so easy to do that, and they watched for it. But if you used the bathroom on the other side-if you said the other one was full, or dirty-you could distract an usher and sneak in. We had done that before, to get two movies for the price of one, but not to see an R movie. It never occurred to me to try to see an R movie. I was a bit of a goody-goody."

Sneaking into R-rated movies-did kids even have to do that anymore? And a movie such as Chinatown, what a disappointment that must have been if you were hoping for salacious kicks. Willoughby wondered if an eleven-year-old, back in 1975, could even grasp the big twist, the incest theme, much less follow the intricate land deal at the heart of the film.

"So I found her in the back row, watching Chinatown, and she got furious with me, told me to go away. Which attracted the usher's attention, and we both got thrown out. She was really angry. Angry enough to scare me. Then she said that she was done with me, that she wouldn't even buy me Karmelkorn as promised, and she didn't want to see me again until our father picked us up at five-thirty."

"So what did you do?"

"Walked around. Looked at things."

"Did you see anyone, speak to anyone?"

"I didn't speak to anyone, no."

Willoughby made a notation on the legal pad they had provided him. This was key. If Pincharelli remembered Heather, she should remember him. It was one of the few things the music teacher had been forthcoming about, eventually. He'd seen Heather in the audience, watching him play.

Nancy Porter, bless her, caught it, too.

"You didn't speak to anyone, okay. But did you see someone, anyone, that you knew?"

"Not that I remember."

"Didn't see anyone familiar. A neighbor, a friend of your parents'?"

"No."

"So you just wandered around the mall, by yourself for three hours...."

"That's what little girls do at malls, from time immemorial. They go to malls and walk around. Didn't you, Detective?"

This earned a baleful look from Gloria, who was not enjoying her client's combative att.i.tude. Detective Porter smiled-a sunny, sincere smile, the kind of smile her subject had probably never been able to deliver in her entire life-and said, "Yeah, but for me it would have been White Marsh, and I hung out in the food court, near Mamma Ilardo's pizza."

"Nice name."

"They made a good pizza."

Nancy bent over her legal pad, writing furiously. All for show, Willoughby knew. All for show.

6:20 P.M.

"Tell me again what happened at the end of the day, when it was time for you to meet."

"I told you."

"Tell me again." Nancy took a swig from a bottle of water. She had offered the woman repeated chances to have a soda, take a bathroom break, but she always said no. Too bad, because if they could get her prints on a gla.s.s, they could run it through the system in minutes, see if they got a hit. Did she know that?

"It was almost five, and I had wandered back to the center, beneath the big green skylight, where the food was. Karmelkorn, Baskin-Robbins. I was thinking that Sunny might change her mind and buy me a treat after all. I decided if she didn't buy me Karmelkorn, I'd tell our parents about the R-rated movie. One way or another, I would get what I wanted. Back then...back then I was very good at getting my way."

"Back then?"

"You'd be surprised how years of s.e.xual servitude break your will."

Willoughby liked the way that the detective nodded, as if sympathetic, but didn't let this information throw her off her stride. Yeah, yeah, years of s.e.xual servitude, that old thing.

"It's-what time is it, when you go to the Karmelkorn?"

"Almost five. I told you."

"How did you know the time?"

"I had a Snoopy watch." Recited in an oh-so-bored voice. "A yellow-faced watch on a wide leather band. It had belonged to Sunny, in fact, and she no longer wore it. I thought it was funny. But the way his arms moved, it was hard to ever know the exact time. So all I can say is, it was going on five."

"And where was the Karmelkorn?"

"I couldn't tell you in terms of north or south, if that's what you want. Security Square was shaped like a plus sign, only one end was much longer than the other. The Karmelkorn would have been on the short, stumpy end that faced where the J. C. Penney was going in, but hadn't opened yet. It was a great place to sit. Even if you weren't eating, the smell was so rich and b.u.t.tery."

"So you were sitting?"

"Yes, on the edge of a fountain. It wasn't a wis.h.i.+ng fountain, but people had thrown coins in. I remember wondering what would happen if I fished them out, if I would get in trouble."

"But you were a goody-goody, you said."

"Even goody-goodies think about such things. In fact, I would say that's what defines us. We're always thinking about the things we don't dare do, figuring out where the lines are drawn, so we can go right up to the edge of things, then plead innocence on the ground of a technicality."

"Was Sunny a goody-goody?"

"No, she was something worse."

"What was that?"

"Someone who wanted to be bad and didn't know how."

7:10 P.M.

Jane Eyre finished-Reader, I married him, he was blind, what other choice did he have?-Kay realized she was without a book. She probably had one in the trunk of her car, but she wasn't sure they would buzz her back into the building if she left. She could ask someone, but she felt that strange adolescent self-consciousness that she had never quite lost. She studied the notices pinned to the bulletin board, the pamphlets. DARE-Drug Awareness Education. No, wait, that didn't add up: Drug Abuse Resistance Education. An infelicitous name, all to create an acronym that didn't work, in Kay's opinion. It was too close to Drug Abuse Resists Education.

The impromptu trip to the mall still bothered her. Should she tell someone? To whom did she owe her loyalty, if anyone? Should she leave? But all that waited for her was an empty house on a Sat.u.r.day night.

7:35 P.M.

"You want a soda?"

"No."

"Because I do. I'll be right back, okay? I'm just going to get a soda. Gloria?"

"I'm fine."

Left alone, the lawyer said to her client, "They're listening to us, just so you know. If we want to speak privately, however, all you have to do is ask."

"I know. I'm fine."

7:55 P.M.

"So where were we?"

"You were getting a soda."

"No, I mean when I left. Where were you, in the story? Oh, yeah, on the edge of the fountain, thinking about the coins."

"A man tapped me on the shoulder-"

"Show me."

"Show you?"

Nancy perched on the table between them. "I'm you. Did he come up from behind you? Which side? Show me."

She approached Nancy from behind, flicking her left shoulder with a little more vehemence than a tap would require.

"So you turn and you see this guy-what did he look like?"

"He was just an old guy to me. Very short hair, gray and brown. Ordinary-looking. He was in his fifties, but I'd only find that out later. At the time the only thing I thought was, He's old."

"Did he say anything?"

"He asked if I was Heather Bethany. He knew my name."

"And did that seem strange to you?"

"No. I was a kid. Grown-ups were always knowing things about me that I didn't know how they knew them. Grown-ups were like G.o.ds. Back then."

"Did you know him?"

"No, but he showed me his badge, right away, told me he was a police officer."

"What did the badge look like?"

"I don't know. A badge. He wasn't wearing a uniform, but he had a badge, and it wouldn't have occurred to me to doubt anything he said."

"Which was?"

"'Your sister's been hurt. Come with me.' So I went. I followed him down a corridor, where the restrooms were. There was an exit back there, marked 'For Emergencies Only,' but it was an emergency, so it made sense to me that we were going that way, rather than the usual entrances."

"Did an alarm sound?"

"An alarm?"

"You walk out doors marked Emergency Exit Only, an alarm usually sounds."

"I don't remember one. Maybe he disabled it. Maybe there wasn't one. I don't know."

"The corridor was...where?"

"Between the center atrium and Sears. It was where the restrooms were, and also where they did the surveys."

"Surveys?"

"Consumer stuff. Sunny told me about it. You could get, like, five dollars for answering questions. But you had to be at least fifteen, so I never got to do it."

8:40 P.M.

Infante slipped into the room where Willoughby and Lenhardt were watching the interrogation.

"You're supposed to be at the airport, waiting for the mom," Lenhardt said to him, but not in a mean, ballbusting way, not to Willoughby's ears.

"I got in early, and she's going to be at least two hours late according to the monitors. I thought I had time to run up here, see how things were going."

"Nancy's doing good," Lenhardt said. "She's taking her time. She's had her going almost four hours now, and she keeps bringing her up to the edge of the actual kidnapping, then going back to the beginning. It's driving her crazy. She's bursting to tell us the bad s.h.i.+t, for some reason."

Infante glanced at his watch. "I'll have to leave for the airport by nine-thirty. You think I'll catch the main show?"

Lenhardt balled his fists and rotated his wrists, peering at his clenched fingers. "Magic Eight Ball says all signs look good."

8:50 P.M.

"So you're outside, and...is it dark?"

"No, it's still light. It's March twenty-ninth. The days were getting longer. We got outside-"

"No alarm on the door?"

"No, no alarm on the door. And there was a van. He opened the door, and Sunny was inside. Before I could register anything-the fact that she was lying down, tied up, the fact that this wasn't a police car-he had caught me up and thrown me back there. I fought, if you could call it that, a little girl flailing her arms at a grown man. But it was completely ineffectual. I wonder-do you think he got Sunny the same way, with the same story? How did he know us? Have you figured that out, Detective? How did Stan Dunham know us? Why did he target us?"

"Stan Dunham's in a retirement community out in Sykesville." A pause. "Did you know that?"

"It's not as if we're pen pals." Said with dry disgust. Yet without worry, Willoughby noticed. Again, they had considered carefully what they would say about Dunham. They had no intention of telling her that he couldn't contradict his own name at this point. But the fact that he was still alive didn't seem to make as much of an impression as it should have. Even if she were telling the truth, shouldn't she be more taken aback by the revelation that her captor, the man who had ruined her life, was just thirty miles west of where she sat?

"Okay, okay-when he grabbed you, did you...lose anything? Leave anything behind?"

"What do you mean?"

"Just that. Did you leave anything behind?"

Her eyes widened. "The purse. Of course, I dropped my purse. How I mourned that purse. I know this will sound weird to you, but it was easier, in the back of that van, to worry about the purse than to think about..." She began to cry, and her lawyer handed her a tissue, although these were the kind of tears that no mere tissue could sop up, hard as rain.

"Can you describe the purse?"