But she wouldn’t call for several hours. To call so early would seem hysterical, suspect. She would wait until the local news stations had shown the photo again and again. And then she would call, feigning ignorance, pretending not to know or care who was assigned to the investigation under way.
It had taken Cynthia’s father less than an hour last night to put her in touch with Sergeant Lenhardt, who was still in the office at midnight, although he had sent his detectives home to prepare for the long day ahead, a day of interviews and field work, even if it was the Fourth of July. He had treated Cynthia with respect and kindness-she was the daughter of Judge Poole-and encouraged her to call the detectives directly.
“Nancy Porter,” he said. “Or Kevin Infante, who’s the primary on the case. But if you’d rather deal with Nancy -well, that’s okay.”
“And why would I rather deal with Nancy?” She knew, of course. Some things are never forgotten. But she was curious whether this sergeant knew as well. Cynthia had a weakness for wanting to know how much others knew about her, the strange attraction-repulsion that gossips, even reformed ones, often feel toward gossip. She dreaded the idea that people might be talking about her. She dreaded the idea that they weren’t.
“I don’t know,” the cautious sergeant said, leaving a space for her to fill, if she so chose. When Cynthia volunteered nothing, he added: “Women like talking to women sometimes, in my experience. They’re both good detectives, they’ll hear you out. They’ll want to know what you know.”
“Why don’t you tell them what I’ve told you? Why do I need to call them at all?”
Now it was his turn to be evasive, to wait out a silence. But the seconds ticked by, with neither speaking, and it was the sergeant who finally broke.
“If you call Nancy-or Detective Infante-then it’s a lead they’ve developed. If it comes from me, they’ll feel second-guessed.”
Plausible, Cynthia thought. But the very fact that she found it “plausible” marked it for the half-truth it probably was. The sergeant wasn’t telling her everything. Which was only fair, as she had not told him close to everything.
So she sat in her kitchen on Saturday, waiting for the morning hours to tick by, waiting for Sleeping Beauty to follow the arc of her destiny, from privileged birth to a date with a spindle to the deathlike sleep from which only true love could wake her. She heard all this because the nursery was still equipped with a baby monitor, which was on all the time. If only Tanika, upstairs on the phone, had remembered to turn it on that day, as Cynthia thought of it. That day, the only day. If only Tanika, hearing the phone ring, had remembered there was one in the kitchen, hadn’t dashed up the stairs to grab the extension in Cynthia’s room. If only she had remembered on which side of the door she had parked the carriage-or hadn’t lied about it later, hadn’t sworn to the skies that Olivia was inside the house, behind the latched screen door. The girl’s clumsy lies, told to cover up her mistakes, had only slowed down the investigation and sent detectives scrambling in the wrong direction.
Cynthia made a pot of coffee, transferred it to a carafe that sat on a ceramic trivet. Italy, she thought. Our honeymoon. Whenever she thought about Tanika-stretched out on Cynthia’s bed, chatting to her boyfriend, shoes leaving black marks on the spread-she always ended up in Italy, on her honeymoon.
Why are you going to Italy, people-well, her parents’ friends-had asked the young couple. Why not Hawaii? Why not Jamaica? Go someplace you won’t work so hard. Why Italy?
“For the shoes,” Cynthia drawled.
People had laughed as she knew they would. “Oh, but you’ll want to see Rome, of course, and Venice, and Tuscany if you have time,” they advised. Cynthia had put a cautionary hand on the arm of such well-intentioned travel guides, and repeated slowly, as if they were hard of hearing, and some of them were: “Yes, that’s all very nice. But I’m going for the shoes.”
No one had believed her, of course. That was one of the advantages of exaggerating one’s own persona. No one ever quite believed that Cynthia was as vain or self-centered as she insisted she was. Perhaps she wasn’t. They may have gone for the shoes, as she later told her friends, but they ended up doing the whole damn boot, from toe to top. They had done it on an unofficial one-for-Warren, two-for-Cynthia basis. This was the model on which their marriage would be based, and it had worked pretty well, up until that day when nothing worked anymore, except inertia and this shared grief, a grief so profound that it would defeat anyone who tried to carry it alone.
In Italy, Cynthia had been surprised to learn that Warren was a dutiful, earnest tourist. It was the first unexpected bit of knowledge in her marriage, and while not unwelcome, it made her wonder just how observant she was. She had seen herself as a conqueror, winning an impossible prize over a large field, yet Warren-the-tourist-guidebook in hand-had ventured dangerously close to geeky. In hindsight, Cynthia realized she should have known that a man as successful and handsome as Warren should have had a little more dog in him. But the face, the shoulders, turned out to be fairly late developments in the life of a bookish little nerd. Growing up in Pittsburgh, Warren had been a grade-grubber whose asthma kept him out of sports, while his strong-willed single mother kept him off the streets lest he be tempted into more unsuitable extracurriculars. Egypt had caught his fancy and led him to a more general appreciation of archaeology. His idea for their honeymoon, broached with the tentativeness of a man already used to his ideas being rejected out of hand, was a dig in Central America, where you paid money for the privilege of sifting through dirt in some maybe-temple. Cynthia had gotten a lot of mileage out of that story.
Still, she would never have denied him his day in Pompeii. She didn’t accompany him-she had stayed in the hotel, writing thank-you notes to her mother’s friends, who would be quick to let Judge and Mrs. Poole know if Cynthia was tardy on this task-but she had paged through the books he brought back. And wished she hadn’t. There was one image she could never shake, an image that came back to her unbidden, time and again. She had seen it when her cell phone rang on July 17, seven years ago. And she saw it last night, about 10:02 P.M., when Brittany Little’s image flashed on her television screen.
It was odd that she had seen the news at all, for Cynthia’s family treated Cynthia like the Sleeping Beauty, trying to shield her from certain things. Only instead of spindles, it was missing children that Cynthia was not allowed to contemplate. For seven years, newspapers had been hidden and television shows muted, lest Cynthia hear about another missing or dead child.
The thing that no one understood was that she didn’t care about any child but her own, and never would.
Finally, 11 A.M., her self-imposed deadline, arrived. She dialed the number the sergeant had given her, and asked to speak to Nancy Porter. She thought she heard a catch in the girl’s voice when she revealed her name, an invitation to speak of their shared history. But she hurried by it, into the present. Nancy Porter was nothing to her. For reasons Cynthia could never quite fathom, she felt shamed in front of the girl, as if the detective had something on her.