“So that’s what you didn’t do. What did you do? What”-she chose, quite deliberately, to echo Alice ’s word back to her-“admonition did you ignore?”
She whispered: “I saw Ronnie.”
“Ronnie Fuller?”
Alice nodded, her face stricken, as if she had confessed to something horrible.
“You saw Ronnie…” She left a space for Alice to finish the thought, but the girl didn’t jump in. “You saw Ronnie do what?”
Alice looked deflated, as if she had expected a more horrified reaction. “I just…saw her. I walked over to where she works and I watched her. She didn’t see me. But I’m not supposed to see her. Sharon said.”
Sharon who? Nancy let it pass. “So you saw her. When was this?”
A flash of impatience: “Yesterday. That’s what we’re talking about, right? Yesterday.”
“You were at the Bagel Barn yesterday?”
“I didn’t go in. I didn’t even get close. I just sat on the curb for a while. I could see Ronnie, but she didn’t see me.”
Alice seemed to have no sense of what she was doing. Yes, she was placing Ronnie at Westview Mall, a few hours before Brittany Little disappeared. But she was placing herself there, too.
“Did you see her do anything…unusual?”
“No. But I saw Ronnie. I thought you’d want to know she worked there. Did you?”
“Actually,” Nancy said, “we did.”
“Oh.” Alice looked confused. “I thought that’s why you came to see me. Because you knew I had seen Ronnie. I thought that’s why I was in trouble. I couldn’t imagine what else I might have done.”
“You can’t?”
The girl shook her head.
“ Alice -did you go into the mall yesterday?”
“No. I left because I didn’t want Ronnie to see me.”
“Why did you want to see Ronnie?”
“I didn’t want to see her. I just did.”
“By accident?”
“Sort of.”
“What do you mean, ‘sort of.’ It was an accident, or it wasn’t.”
“I knew from my mom that Ronnie had a job at the bagel place. But I didn’t know her hours, or what days she worked. So it’s not like I could have planned it.”
“But you went there hoping you might see her?”
Her eyes slid away from Nancy ’s. “Yes,” she said in a voice so soft that Nancy needed Alice ’s nodding head to confirm what she thought she had heard.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” And then, almost to herself, as if castigating herself. “I thought you didn’t know about the bagel shop, that I could help you. I want to help. I’m trying to help.”
“You can help us,” Nancy said, “by telling the truth.”
Fierce, automatic: “I always tell the truth.”
“Then tell me this. Do you know anything about Brittany Little, the girl who disappeared? Anything at all, Alice?”
“I don’t know Brittany Little. I mean, except from the news. I saw her picture on the news.”
“Can I ask you something, Alice?”
Alice gave her an odd look, as if it were late in the game for Nancy to be seeking permission to ask questions. Still, she nodded.
“I mean, it’s only because it might give me-give us-an insight. When you took Olivia Barnes, what were you thinking?”
The wounded blue eyes cut right through her, saw the deception in Nancy ’s question. “How would that give you an insight? I mean, unless Ronnie or I did what happened. And I didn’t.”
“Still-” Nancy had to know. Even if it proved to have nothing to do with the matter at hand, she had to have the answer to the question that had haunted her for so many years. “What were you thinking?”
“We thought she had been abandoned. We thought we could take care of her until her parents came back.”
“And why did you kill her?”
“I didn’t,” Alice said with a weariness at once disappointed and resigned. “Ronnie did. I wasn’t even there when it happened.”
“I know that’s what you said back then. But you can tell the truth now. It’s over. There’s no risk now in telling me what happened.”
“I am telling the truth. I always told the truth. It’s not my fault that no one believed me. Ronnie’s a bad girl. You can’t know what she’ll do. It’s almost like there’s another girl who lives inside Ronnie and comes out sometimes. That’s why people want to believe Ronnie when she says she didn’t do things, because she doesn’t remember doing them, so she seems really honest. But she’s bad, really bad.”
“Are you saying she has, like, another personality?”
“Sort of?” Alice ’s voice was tentative. “I saw this show once, and there was a girl like that. Only with Ronnie, it’s not so…obvious, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Her voice doesn’t change, and she doesn’t tell you to call her by a different name. But it’s like there’s good Ronnie and bad Ronnie, and bad Ronnie will do anything, and then good Ronnie can’t believe she did it, so she’s believable when she says she doesn’t remember. I don’t know why she killed Olivia. If I had been there, maybe I could have stopped her. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t even there.”
Alice ’s voice rose, petulant after all these years. Yes, she took the baby, yes, she knew where the baby was, yes, she participated in the conspiracy that kept the baby hidden for four days. But she hadn’t killed her, and she still didn’t understand why the punishments meted out refused to recognize her lesser guilt.
Nancy wasn’t sure she did, either. Her odd connection to the Barnes case had not granted her special privileges, despite what everyone believed, but over the years she had indulged her curiosity about the aftermath. Alice had always been adamant about not being with Ronnie when Olivia was killed, and even had a partial alibi-she was home with her mother, reading, if you could call that an alibi. Whose mother wouldn’t back up that story, under the circumstances? But the alibi was meaningless because heat and other factors had made it difficult to pinpoint the time of death with any accuracy. The medical examiner had provided a twelve-hour window, adding, as only an M.E. could add: “At least nothing chewed on her after she died.” That was an M.E.’s idea of a benediction, not getting chewed postmortem.