Every Secret Thing

“I’m looking for Maveen Little,” she told the sullen man who answered the door, the boyfriend. She recognized him from television.

“She busy,” he said. The dropped verb seemed to signify his contempt for her.

“I’m from the Beacon-Light-”

“Look, she’s talked out. She got nothing more to say to the news.”

Mira could hear low voices in the apartment, women’s voices. One sounded broken and scratchy. The other was pitched lower, her words indistinct, but they sounded like words of comfort. So Maveen was talking, but she was talking to someone else. Another reporter? A cop? Mira conjured up an image of Nostrildamus, nodding and smiling at her, perhaps even handing her one of the fifty-dollar gift certificates that reporters got for going the “extra mile.”

“It won’t take long,” she said. “One quick question-”

“Not today,” he said, and closed the door in her face. In that bewildered split second, Mira actually considered sticking her foot between the door and its frame. But she was wearing new light-colored sandals that would show scuff marks. Besides, this guy would probably enjoy crushing someone’s toes.

She went outside and sat in her car, the key turned in the ignition so the radio played and the air-conditioning blew. She felt humiliated, despite the fact that no one had witnessed her rebuke. Failure is not an option, failure is not an option, she tried to chant to herself, but who was she trying to kid? Failure was always an option. She was begi

What if she proved to be a failure after all? At this assignment, at this job, at this career-what would it mean to be a failure? For the first time, she dared to wonder if people she considered successful might be failures in disguise. Her father was a stockbroker, the old-fashioned kind who wasn’t given to daring speculation or sexy deals, but he had provided his family with a comfortable lifestyle. Was that what he had set out to be? She had never thought about this before. Her father was a stockbroker because his father was a stockbroker.

The motto said: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. But did that mean trying something new, or doing the same thing until you got it right? Did Nostrildamus want to be where he was, or had he coveted a different career path, perhaps at one of the big national newspapers? The world of medium-sized newspapers was not much different from those little Eastern European countries that had appeared after the Cold War ended. No one knew exactly where they were or why they mattered.

Tears pricked the corners of her eyes and she winked them away violently, even though no one was watching. She was trapped. She couldn’t leave the Beacon-Light until she was perceived as a success, but she was afraid for the first time that she might not be. She had told herself there was nothing she couldn’t do if she tried, but the lie was becoming impossible to maintain. There was so much she couldn’t do, from physics to the simple act of rolling her tongue in that fu

She was so distracted by her own thoughts that she almost didn’t notice the woman emerging from the vestibule of Maveen Little’s apartment, a tall, regal-looking black woman in a killer dress, the casual kind that couldn’t be touched for less than four hundred dollars, and that price didn’t include the just-right handbag and the matching coral-colored slides. The woman climbed into an SUV, a BMW that looked much too nice for the surroundings, but Mira hadn’t zeroed in on it before.

Eyes still moist, Mira reached for her pad and wrote down the license plate. She would ask someone low-level in the library to run it tomorrow, claiming it was co

27.

Sharon Kerpelman was forever apologizing for her condo, which was difficult to find and not much easier to enter, with codes at the parking gate and the lobby. She also made excuses for its location, deep within the suburbs, and its willful sterility. She apologized because she expected people to expect her to be ashamed of a place that was clean, well kept, and bursting with amenities. She never bothered to explain that she had fled the city because she had suddenly realized she had endured enough charm to last her a lifetime.

That epiphany came while she was looking for an apartment in the Mount Vernon section, just north of downtown. The city had finally begun to develop some high-end rentals, but they were clustered to the east, near the water, or around the hospital complex on the western edge. Neither location appealed to Sharon, who thought her life might make more sense if she could walk to work, given that she never had time to exercise. An agent listened carefully to her wants and proceeded to take her to a series of ever shabbier places that didn’t begin to meet her criteria. When she entered the apartment with the bedroom accessible only through the kitchen, Sharon muttered to herself: “Enough.” Within a week, using only the classified section of the Beacon-Light, she had found her current place, in the Cedars of Owings Mills. Her mother was thrilled, but Sharon liked it anyway, because it was so obviously not what people expected of her.

She had always enjoyed confounding others’ expectations. Even when she lived in renovated mill cottages and tacky rowhouses, she had surprised visitors with her taste in furniture, which ran to postmodern collectibles or good imitations. Messy at work, she was neat at home, obsessively so, with no patience for clutter. She loved people’s puzzled glances when they came through the door, their attempt to reconcile public Sharon with private Sharon.

So on Sunday evening, as she waited for her visitors, she couldn’t help wondering if they would notice how beautiful her apartment was. She sat in a Stickley chair, feet tucked beneath her, staring out the plate-glass doors that led to a tiny patio. The sun had just set, so she could make out her own ghostly image in the window. She liked what she saw, although she knew being a not-beautiful woman was supposed to be a tragedy. Not-beautiful was Sharon’s coinage, and it was more or less accurate. Her features were even enough, her hair smooth, her figure pretty good. The only visible defect was the patterned birthmark on her cheek, and it was much less objectionable, in her opinion, than acne-ravaged skin. Plain might be the most accurate term, but it sounded a bit self-pitying, and not ugly sounded anything but. So-not-beautiful. She was not beautiful, not pretty, not cute. But she got by. In fact, Daniel Kutchner had called yesterday, but she was too busy to see him. Or going to be.

The doorbell rang. She had given both sets of expected visitors the two sets of codes, so she didn’t have to buzz them in. She had also given her guests two different arrival times, so she knew who was on the other side of her door. Still, she checked the fisheye, just to be sure.

“Sharon, sweetie,” Rosario said, kissing the air and getting a few strands of Sharon’s hair caught in her mouth. Something alcoholic was on her breath, which Sharon expected, but still found shocking. Drinking was so goyish. Catholic, she amended, for Rosario practiced that form of semialcoholism based on wine and watered-down whiskey.

Even when viewed without a distorting lens, Rosario Bustamante was an odd-looking woman. Short and chunky, with ski