The real obstacle, Alice knew, was that she was fat. The show sometimes had fat girls, but they were always black. The white girls were thin, thinner each year, so thin they could wear belly shirts and bikinis and navel rings. She wasn’t sure why the black girls could be fat and the white girls couldn’t, but clearly there was a rule. Come to think of it, not even the black girls were fat anymore.
Still, it felt good to outline her most interesting qualities in a letter, even if she never planned to send it, and no one would ever read it. People were always telling Alice she had so many opportunities, yet the only ones they could come up with were work and school. That didn’t seem like so much to Alice. That seemed like what everyone else had. “You have your whole life ahead of you,” Helen told Alice, and Sharon Kerpelman had said much the same thing. But Alice knew they were wrong. She had her whole life behind her, a huge, cumbersome weight that she had to drag with her wherever she went, like her own body. Such a life should be good for something.
She studied what she had written. Once enamored of cursive, she had recently discovered she wrote much faster if she printed. Her letters were now squat little capitals instead of the sedate ships that had once skimmed slowly across her pages. The new handwriting was still not fast enough to suit her, however. She would prefer to compose on her mother’s computer, but she couldn’t bring the computer to bed, and more important, she couldn’t trust Helen to respect her privacy. Helen always swore she was the kind of mother who respected others’ need for secrets, but, well, Helen was a liar. A big fat liar, and for what? Helen’s lies made no sense to Alice.
Even here, in a notepad she can hide beneath her mattress, in a letter she will never send, a letter no one will ever read-even here, she does not dare tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as they used to say on television. In her real life so far, no one has used that phrase. But then she never got to the point where she was allowed to testify, never put her hand on a book and swore to God. She had wanted to, but no one else wanted her to. In fact, the whole point seemed to be to keep Alice quiet. They kept saying it wouldn’t be good for her and Ronnie to go before the judge without everything decided. They needed to reach an agreement outside of court. Alice didn’t see how that agreement had helped her at all. The truth was on her side, not Ronnie’s. And one day, when she was allowed to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, everyone would finally be helpless before her.
She turned the page over and started a new letter, one that would be sent, when the time was right.
Sunday, July 5
24.
Lenhardt unfurled a regional map across a desk. There were the sisters, Baltimore and Baltimore, city and county, joined but never merged, locked together like two chain-gang escapees in one of those old movies.
“Do you know what this is?”
“A map,” Infante said. He was absolutely earnest. The sergeant had asked a question, and by God, the detective had an answer. Nancy started to giggle, only to end up yawning instead. It was 11 A.M., and she had slept for a few hours while Infante kept trying to rouse the sleeping Ronnie, but they were getting punch-drunk from exhaustion. They were also beginning to smell from being in the same clothes for more than twenty-four hours.
“Excellent, Detective Infante. Yes, this is a map,” Lenhardt said. “But a map of what?”
“ Baltimore?”
“No, my friend. It may look like Baltimore, but this is Fuckedville, U.S.A., our new hometown for the foreseeable future.”
“Why…are…we…fucked?” Nancy yawned involuntarily between each word. Lenhardt had cursed in front of her. Things must be bad indeed. She wondered if this meant he could never go back to not-cursing in front of her.
“Don’t be crude, Nancy.” The sergeant’s correction was automatic and unironic. “The commissioner wants to do a search.”
“We can’t do a search. We don’t have any information on where the child might be.”
“No, but we do have a dedicated young detective who pulled a suspect out of Leakin Park late last night.” Lenhardt nodded at Nancy. “Good work, by the way, although I wish you had told someone where you were going. And you should have used a car with a radio. Just to be safe.”
“Pulled a suspect out,” Infante said. “But she hasn’t told us anything.”
“We don’t even have a charge on her,” Nancy said.
“What’s her story for Friday night?”
“Home alone.” Nancy had managed to learn that much. “Parents were at a bullroast for dad’s union, which matches up with what her mother told us. But she doesn’t have anything to prove where she was from four, which is when she said she got home from the bagel shop, to eleven, when her parents came home.”
“A teenage girl didn’t make a phone call? Didn’t get on a computer and do that weird talkie-typie thing they do? My kids can’t go twenty minutes without making some kind of contact with their friends.”
“She doesn’t have any friends.” Nancy remembered the mother’s sad, resigned phrase. No boyfriend. No friends. Period.
“What about Alice Manning?”
“The girls claim they haven’t connected since they got home. Alice admitted she went by Ronnie’s workplace, just to get a look at her, but said Ronnie has no idea.”
“That was weird, Sarge,” Infante interrupted. “The girl comes in here, on her own steam, to tell us this story that puts her right there a few hours before everything happens. Then this lawyer shows up-a lawyer the girl called and left a message for before she headed in here-and the girl’s suddenly saying that it wasn’t on Friday, that it was a week or two ago, on a Saturday.”
“Yeah, what was that about?” Lenhardt wondered, with no expectation of an answer.
What indeed, Nancy echoed in her head. Her best guess was that Alice, either out of well-intentioned helpfulness or a maliciousness nursed for seven years, wanted to make sure that no one overlooked Ronnie’s proximity to the scene. She had lied. Or had she? Sharon Kerpelman said she had picked her up for dinner at eight on Friday evening. Four hours wasn’t enough time to abduct a child, disguise her, stash her or kill her, then walk three miles home. But what if Alice wasn’t on foot? And what if she wasn’t acting alone?
“As long as the girl is missing, the commissioner wants a search,” Lenhardt said. “He wants to make sure we look like we’re doing everything we can. At the same time-and the commissioner told this to the major, who passed the word to me-he doesn’t want anything to get out about how this case may be linked to any other.”