“Did you see anyone?” Mary Jo asked the pharmacist. “Who would have pushed my cart here? Was she in the way? Who would do a thing like that? What kind of store is this?”
In her mind, she was seeing some employee push the cart aside because it was blocking the aisle. She would sue, she would raise a fuss. What kind of person pushed a cart with a baby into this little corridor by the bathrooms?
The pharmacist shrugged. At dinner that night, he would tell his wife the story, putting all the blame on Mary Jo. His own children were grown. He could afford to be smug, all the near misses his family had known over the years long forgotten.
As for Mary Jo, she never told the story to anyone-not to Mimi, who would have found a way to blame her, or Bobby, who was in a sour mood when he finally dropped by that evening, long after Jordan had gone to bed. He brought a few dollars, but when Mary Jo asked when she was going to start getting a check regular, now that he was working, he said he’d quit if she tried to garnish his wages, that a man couldn’t get ahead in this world if women were always going to be at them. She said he wasn’t much of a man if he couldn’t support his daughter.
It was a familiar argument from start to finish. Bobby slammed out, leaving her to clean up after their cookout. Bobby was always careful to get a meal before he let a fight begin. Mary Jo went to bed alone. He hadn’t even noticed her hair, which she had washed and styled with the new gel. If he had commented on her hair, she might have told him the story of what happened in Rite Aid. Or not. Bobby might have used it against her, and even Mimi would have found a way to blame Mary Jo.
It would be two months before the next child disappeared.
Monday, June 22
9.
Summer finally began. It began over and over again. It began in mid-May, with a disturbingly early heat wave. It began again on Memorial Day, when the private swim clubs opened for business, even though the heat wave had receded and the weather had reverted to the cold and dreary days of April. It began with each last day of school, district by district, with the city of Baltimore always the last to release its children. It began with the first Code Red day, an index of air, not terror, issued when the heat held the smog too close to the city. It began every Friday about 4 P.M., when the local radio stations reported that the back-ups at the toll plazas for the Bay Bridge were now three miles, four miles, five miles long. It began when the fireflies appeared and a new generation of children tested the folklore that the insects could not fly if one walked with them balanced on a fingertip.
A new summer ritual was also under way that year-the disappearance of children, little girls. They went missing from parks and stores, from yards and porches. But no one noticed, because the girls reappeared minutes later, before their absence had been logged. Even the girls themselves did not seem to recognize the extraordinary thing that had happened to them. Even if they had, they couldn’t have told anyone, for they were toddlers, too young to speak, much less compare notes.
By the time the vernal equinox actually arrived, summer already seemed careworn and used. This happened to be the day that Nancy put on her best suit and went to the courthouse, perhaps the ugliest public building in all of Baltimore County, no small distinction. There, she testified before the grand jury, which needed little encouragement to hand up capital murder indictments against three of the four boys in the New York Fried Chicken killing. The fourth would be tried on robbery and manslaughter charges, which was the deal he had cut for himself. He chose to risk the near-sure death sentence of being a witness, to the guaranteed death sentence given to anyone convicted of a capital crime in Baltimore County.
Duty done, Nancy and Infante met their sergeant at the Italian place on Washington, the chain restaurant that she liked so much. Lenhardt always insisted on treating, claiming the county would pick up the tab, but Nancy suspected these lunches came out of his pocket.
“She going for death?” Infante asked Lenhardt, the she in question being the Baltimore County prosecutor.
“She always does,” Lenhardt said, slathering a bread stick with the restaurant’s trademark tapenade. Nancy was pretending to enjoy a small house salad.
“Good,” Infante said.
“But the victim’s mother might not want it,” Nancy said. She was remembering the woman she had met back in April, a woman whose life had tested her faith yet never weakened it. The walls of the woman’s rowhouse had featured a riotous competition between God’s only son and her only son, with Jesus edging out Franklin Morris. “She’s Christian.”
“So?” Infante said. “Aren’t we all?”
“I mean a real one. Very devout. And you know the state’s attorney won’t go for the death penalty if the relatives don’t want it.”
“Christian?” Lenhardt pretended to be indignant. “Well, eye for an eye is the oldest Christian rule of all.”
“I guess she’s more New Testament, turn the other cheek, like.”
“The New Testament,” Lenhardt said, wagging his breadstick, “is the New Coke of religion. They need to throw that sucker out and go back to the original recipe.”
Nancy gasped so hard, trying not to laugh, that she almost swallowed a cherry tomato from her salad. She was no more religious than the average lapsed Catholic, but it was not a subject about which she could joke. She felt too guilty, being AWOL from St. Casimir’s all these years.
“Anyway, you let that nice Christian lady sit through a little testimony, see a few crime scene photos, and she’ll be ready to give those guys the injection her own self.”
Infante nodded sagely. It was one of his few moves that got under Nancy ’s skin, that wise nod, as if there were things that only he and Lenhardt could understand.
Lenhardt was on a roll, the topic of religion having struck his fancy for some reason. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. And that’s the New Testament, by the way.”
Nancy didn’t know the Bible that well, but she was determined to argue the point: “Is mine. His, not ours. So isn’t God saying we’re not supposed to be in the vengeance business?”
“He’s saying we do it for him, so we better do it right.” But Lenhardt was guessing at the meaning, too. Not a one of them at the table-two Catholics and a Lutheran-at least she thought Lenhardt was a Lutheran-had the credentials to play even half-assed theologians.
“I’ll tell you what I know about revenge,” Infante piped up. He pronounced the word REE-venge, as if it were an act of repetition, not reaction. “It feels good. That’s why God wants it for himself. He knows how much fun it is.”