What The Dead Know

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“The media’s done what it can,” Willoughby had said just last month as they watched crews digging holes on an old farm out toward Finksburg.

“Still, if only from a historical standpoint, the fact that it happened…” The countryside was beautiful here. Why had he never come to Finksburg before, seen how beautiful it was despite its bum name? But the highway had been extended to this part of the county only recently. Before the road construction, it would have been impossible to live here and work in town.

“At this point it’s going to come down to an arrest,” Willoughby had said as the day wore on and more holes were dug, and the detective gave up on the enterprise in progress. “Someone who knows something and will want to use it as a bartering chip. Or perhaps the guy himself. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s already in custody for another crime. There are lots of unsolved cases that have gotten all the publicity in the world-Etan Patz, Adam Walsh.”

“They came after,” Dave said, as if this were an issue of primogeniture. “And Adam Walsh’s parents at least have a body.”

“They have a head,” Willoughby said, his pedantic nature coming to the fore. “They never found the body.”

“You know what? I’d kill for a head at this point.”

The call about that Finksburg farm had been so promising. For one thing, it had come from a woman, and while women in general were no more sane than men, they did not have the kind of craziness that sought release in taunting the family of two presumed murder victims. Besides, this was a neighbor, a woman who had provided her full name. A man named Lyman Ta

She had been asked, Willoughby reported back to Dave, why she would remember such a detail eight years later.

“Simple,” said the woman, Yvo

Still, the oddness of that car wash did not come back to her until a few months ago, when Lyman Ta

“And he made a big to-do about putting in crops, rented a tractor and all to till up the field, but then he never done nothing with it,” Mrs. Yepletsky said.

The Baltimore County Police Department hired a bulldozer.

The crew was on its twelfth hole when another neighbor helpfully informed them that Mrs. Yepletsky was disgruntled because her husband wanted to buy the land and Ta

Given that his breakfast consisted solely of black coffee, Dave required only twenty minutes to finish it and the paper, rinse out his cup, and head upstairs to get dressed. It was barely 7:00 A.M. Three hundred and sixty-four days of the year, he kept his daughters’ bedroom doors closed, but he always opened them on this day, allowed himself a little tour. He felt not unlike Bluebeard in reverse. If a woman were to join him in this house-unimaginable to him, but theoretically possible-he would forbid her to enter these rooms. She would, of course, defy him and sneak in behind his back. But instead of discovering the corpses of his previous wives, she would find preserved time capsules of two girls’ lives, April 1975.

In Heather’s pink-and-white room, Max of Where the Wild Things Are circled the world, found the island of the wild things, yet still made it home in time for supper. A few teen idols had crept onto the walls beneath Max, toothy boys all, indistinguishable to Dave’s eyes. Next door, Su

One might expect that the rooms, shut up and untouched, would get dirty and musty, yet Dave found them startlingly fresh and alive. It was reasonable, sitting on the beds in these rooms-and this morning he tried out the beds in both, bold as Goldilocks-to imagine that their owners would return by nightfall. Even the police, who had briefly considered the possibility that the girls were runaways, had conceded that these rooms showed that the occupants expected to return. True, it was odd that Heather had taken all her money to the mall, but perhaps that had been the source of the trouble. There were people who might hurt a child for forty dollars, and the money was not in her purse when it was found.

Of course, the moment the police ruled out the fact that the girls had left on their own, it was Dave’s turn to be the suspect. To this day Willoughby had never acknowledged, much less apologized for, the unfairness and awkwardness of that inquiry, or the vital hours that had been lost in this misdirection. Dave subsequently learned that family members were always suspect in such cases, but the specifics of his life-the crumbling marriage, the failing shop, the college trust funds started by Miriam’s parents-had made the accusation specifically heinous. “You think I killed my children for money?” he asked, all but lunging at Willoughby. The detective hadn’t taken it personally. “I’m not thinking anything just yet,” he said with a shrug. “There are questions, and I’m getting answers. That’s all.”

To this day Dave wasn’t sure what was worse: being suspected of a financial motive in his daughters’ deaths or being accused of killing them to get back at his philandering spouse. Miriam had acted as if she were so noble, spilling her secret to the cops so quickly, but her secret had also provided the perfect alibi for her and her lover. “What if they did it?” Dave asked the police. “What if they did it and framed me, so they could run off together?” But not even he believed that scenario.

He didn’t mind so much that Miriam had left him, but he lost all respect for her when she left Baltimore as well. She had abandoned the vigil. She was not strong enough to live with the kneading, needling hope and the impossible possibilities it whispered in his ear. “They’re dead, Dave,” Miriam said the last time they spoke, over two years ago. “The only thing we have to look forward to is the official discovery of what we know is true. The only thing to cling to is that it’s less horrific than we’ve dared to imagine. That someone took them and shot them, or killed them in a way that involved no suffering. That they weren’t sexually assaulted, that-”