Nancy pushed the photograph of Brittany Little across the table.
“She’s pretty,” Ronnie said.
“Does she look like anyone you know?”
“Yeah, yeah, she does. A little.”
“Who does she look like, Ronnie?”
“Like Alice?”
“Like Alice? This girl is biracial and has curly hair.”
Ronnie looked confused. “You’re right. I don’t know why I said that. It just popped out. Sometimes I say Alice. I don’t know why.”
“Ronnie, do you think about Alice a lot?”
“No.” She paused. “Not a lot.”
“It would be understandable if you did.”
“Why?”
The girl seemed genuine in her need for a reply, almost yearning. “Because…because of the history you share. I would guess that’s something you don’t forget.”
“Ever?”
“What?”
“Do you think one day I might forget? A man-a doctor-said I might. He said as time went by, I would have other things to think about, other things that would…define me.”
Stumped for something to say, Nancy picked up the photograph and looked at the smiling girl. Are you alive? Please tell me you’re alive.
“You know, we found her clothes in the bathroom.” She wouldn’t mention the hair, not yet. They didn’t want that detail out. Not even the girl’s mother had been told she had been shorn, in part because her own boyfriend might have done it, just to create the illusion of a stranger abduction. “There was blood on them. And blood on a T-shirt.”
Ronnie’s eyes were wide. “A lot?”
“Enough to worry us. Also enough to test-and guess what?” She waited a beat to see if Ronnie would volunteer anything. “It wasn’t the girl’s blood.”
“How could you tell?”
“Blood’s like a fingerprint. It’s unique. It wasn’t her blood, and it wasn’t her mother’s blood. We compared them.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah, it’s amazing what we can do with a little blood. You know, if we took some of your blood and compared it to what we found, and found out it was different, we could let you go home.”
“You want me to give you blood?” Ronnie stiffened and jerked her head back.
“You don’t have to. But it could speed things up. We can take it from your finger, with just a little prick. You ever make yourself blood sisters with someone when you were a kid?”
Ronnie shook her head both ways, from a tentative yes to an increasingly vehement no. She was almost like one of those bobble-head dolls-once her head started to move, she couldn’t seem to regain control of it. Only instead of swaying gently up and down, it continued to swing from side to side. “No, no, no, no, no, no.”
“It’s just a tiny prick, you wouldn’t even notice. And if it’s not your blood-and it won’t be your blood, right, Ronnie, because you don’t know what happened-if it’s not your blood, we have to leave you alone.”
“No.” It wasn’t quite a scream, yet something in the girl’s tone made Nancy jump. “Nobody cuts me but me.”
“What?”
“I mean-I don’t want to. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.”
She began striking her palms on the table now to underscore her words until Nancy finally had to grab her by the wrists to make her stop. For one crazed moment the girl looked as if she wanted to bite her. Her small white teeth snapped near Nancy ’s face, the way a terrier might.
Then she went limp, and Nancy released her arms, letting her fall to the table. Cradling her head in her hands, the girl began to cry.
“Is Brittany Little still alive, Ronnie? It will make all the difference in the world if we find her and she’s still alive. And if she’s dead-well, we’ll go easier on the one who helps us. I can’t make a deal, I’m just a police, but it’s always better to be the one who cooperates.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Ask Alice. Take her blood. Ask Alice. Cut Alice.” She looked up then, sniffing, and said the magic words. “I want to go home now. Can I go home now? Can I call my mom? Do I need to call a lawyer?”
“Yes,” Nancy said. “I mean, yes, you can go, and yes, you can call your mom. You don’t really need a lawyer, though.”
Not yet.
She escorted the girl from the room to her desk, and let her use the phone there. As she walked, Ronnie was muttering to herself, and Nancy could just barely make out the words.
“Nobody cuts me but me. Nobody cuts me but me.”
25.
“You should go to her.”
“What?” Cynthia Barnes snapped her head away from the television screen in the kitchen and fumbled without success for the power switch on the remote, as if she had been caught doing something illicit.
“You should go to her,” repeated Warren, standing there in bare feet, his golf shoes in his hand so they wouldn’t damage the stone floor. She still remembered their consternation when the contractor explained, after the fact, that stone could be damaged.
“I have nothing to say to her.” But Maveen Little had finally disappeared, and the face on the television was a child’s, beaming over an Esskay hot dog.
“You have something to share. Something in common.”
It was all she could do not to snap back: I will never have anything in common with Maveen Little.
“I’m worried she’s not going to engender a lot of sympathy,” Cynthia said, picking her words carefully.
“Because she’s unattractive and inarticulate?” Warren was being characteristically generous. Maveen Little was ugly, pale and overweight, with bad skin and a home permanent. “Oh, honey, people aren’t that bad.”
“They’re worse, and you know it.”
Warren had no answer for that, so he kissed her on the temple, more of a father’s kiss than a husband’s, and eeled out the door, his last look for the television, which he clearly yearned to turn off. When had their kisses migrated from mouth to cheek to temple? Before Rosalind’s birth or after? Cynthia couldn’t remember. She supposed a day would come when Warren would kiss the top of her head, or settle for a fond shoulder pat, and she still wouldn’t care. She loved him, possibly more than ever, but she just couldn’t work up the abandon of man-woman love, not while trying to maintain the vigilance required by mother-child love.