Every Secret Thing

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.

“As you may recall, my own daughter was taken almost seven years ago,” she told the detective.

“I remember the case,” the detective said, but she didn’t volunteer anything more.

“Yes. And as you probably recall, she was missing for several days before she was…found.” Cynthia paused, wondering if she needed to add a word to that sentence. Dead. My baby was found dead. To this day, she hated to say it so plainly. It wasn’t the starkness of the word that bothered Cynthia, it was its simplicity. Dead did not begin to encompass what had happened to her child. Dead ended.

“I know,” the detective all but whispered.

“They’re home, you know. Within the past few weeks. They’re home, back in Southwest Baltimore, not even three miles from where this happened.”

“Do you have any specific information that links them to this case?”

“They’re home. What more do you need to know?”

“Well, but-in some ways, the two…disappearances are very different. Your daughter was an infant, this girl is a toddler. Your child was taken on impulse, this seems to be part of a more calculated plan, with clothes being swapped-”

“You want information? You want similarities? Well, here it is. The little girl who was taken-” She groped for the name, which had not registered.

“ Brittany Little.”

“Yes. Brittany Little. Well, Brittany Little has long curly hair and café-au-lait skin. Brittany Little is, in fact, a dead-ringer for my three-year-old, who’s sitting upstairs right now. But I can’t help wondering if that might be different, if these girls weren’t so inept.”

“You have another daughter?” The detective’s voice was surprised, almost awed.

“Yes. And I’d like this one to live. I’d like Brittany Little to live, too.” The sentiment was a split-second late. Of course she wanted the child to be found unharmed. She wouldn’t volunteer anyone for what had happened to her.

But what Cynthia really wanted was for Alice Ma

“Do the girls know about your new child? Have they threatened your family in any way, or made any attempts to contact you?”

“This is not a time for questions.” Cynthia had lost all patience and was, for a moment, the woman she used to be-a boss, a supervisor, a political operative, a person who gave orders and saw them carried out. “Don’t sit there blabbing to me. Who knows why they do what they do, then or now. Who cares anything about their motives? They waited, last time. Remember? They waited four days. If you arrest them now, maybe they won’t do what they did last time. Maybe they won’t kill another child.”

“Mrs. Barnes-”

“You will talk to them.” It was at once a question and a command.

“I’m not at liberty to discuss our investigation.”

Cynthia did not allow any tentativeness to seep into her voice this time. “You will talk to them.”

“Yes.” The detective’s voice was almost a whisper. “God, yes. Of course we’ll talk to them.”

Cynthia Barnes hung up the phone and poured herself another cup of coffee. The trivet took her to Italy, Italy took her to Pompeii, and Pompeii always brought her back to the place where the world ended, which happened to be on Oliver Street in East Baltimore, on July 17, seven years ago.

She had been on a corner in East Baltimore because the mayor, who loved to dress up, had put on a garbageman’s uniform and gone out with a trash crew to one of those neighborhoods that was always bellyaching about how neglected it was by the mayor’s administration. Normally, Cynthia wouldn’t have been there at all, but there was an out-of-town reporter following the mayor, and she wanted to keep an eye on things.

While she was baby-sitting the mayor, Tanika, a nineteen-year-old Coppin student, was baby-sitting Olivia. The girl had just started with the Barnes family a month before. Dutiful and dull, she had been hired for her seeming lack of interest in boys and clothes, and-more crucially-boys’ seeming lack of interest in her. Who could have known that she already had a boyfriend, a demigangster she was forbidden to see at home, who called her at the Barnes house every hour of the day? Who could guess that he would call just as she pushed Olivia’s carriage out on the front walk and that she would run back inside to take the call, thinking it would require no more than a minute of her time? And who could guess that Tanika, terrified of her reverend father’s knowing of her disobedience, would fritter away five, ten, fifteen, thirty, sixty, ninety precious minutes trying to find Olivia on her own? Ninety minutes were lost by the time she dared to call Cynthia on her cell. Ninety minutes gone, then four days gone, and finally, a lifetime.

But at the corner of Oliver and Montford, seven years ago, Cynthia knew none of this. She knew only that the baby-sitter was on the phone, trying to relay the impossible news that Olivia was missing. At that moment, Cynthia was still fighting, still struggling, still convinced she could do something-and that’s when she remembered the image from Warren’s guidebook, the one that had turned her stomach. It had been a photo of a dog, lashed to a post, preserved in the moment of his struggle. Twisted, writhing, he fought against the molten lava and the ash, determined not to die. For some reason, the dog seemed more conscious of his fate than all the humans of Pompeii combined. They stood still. The dog fought back.

“What’s wrong?” asked her summer intern, a bright young thing named Lisa Bell, who had styled herself after her boss until she was known as Cynthia-ette, or sometimes just Junior. “What’s wrong, Cynthia?”

It happened that the photographer who was traveling with the out-of-town reporter caught the mayor in the pose she wanted at the exact moment Cynthia snapped her cell phone shut. The photo captured the mayor in the foreground, gri

Now, on this July morning, she felt the first real stirrings of life she had known in ages. Not even Rosalind, turning somersaults on the sonogram, had made Cynthia feel this vital, this necessary. Alice Ma

18.

Helen Ma

“I’m Kevin Infante,” said the male detective, who had the kind of Mediterranean good looks to which Helen was once partial. She found herself patting her hair, ru

“We were hoping to talk to your-to Alice Ma