Little Deaths(35)

“Oh sure, I liked her. She was a good worker. And she had something about her. She could sit down with anyone, a bunch of suits, anyone. And within five minutes, she’d have them laughing, ordering cocktails. She was bright. A real live wire.”

She shook her head. “When I first heard about this, I didn’t believe she had anything to do with it. I mean, I could never really see her as a mother, the way she was, the way she looked.”

She shrugged. “Still.”

She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another. And then, “But afterward. Well, she was back here four days after they buried the boy. So drunk she couldn’t stand straight and flirting with every guy in sight. And no tears. Nothing.”

She blew out a long plume of smoke, her lips a sticky pink O. “I changed my mind about her after that. The next day I called her, two, three times, to ask when she was coming back to work. I figured—she can go out and enjoy herself, she can come into work. Right? She never called back.”

She shrugged. “So the boss told me to send her a check for two weeks’ pay, tell her she was being laid off. And now look at her.”

She nodded toward Ruth, moving slowly on the dance floor, arms raised, eyes closed. “I mean, what kind of mother behaves like that?”


Ruth’s car was in the shop for a week, which made trailing her harder. He got into the habit of parking on the corner around seven each morning, before his shift began, waiting for her to come out. If she turned onto Main Street, she was grocery shopping. If she kept going toward the expressway, it meant she was catching a bus.

One morning she came out dressed in a neat blue suit, low heels. Not shopping, then.

It was August 20. Five weeks since the kids were reported missing.

The bus came and she took a seat in the middle, by the window. Pete sat two rows back, on the other side of the aisle.

She didn’t seem to notice him. Didn’t seem to notice anyone. She just held her handbag on her lap, a cigarette between her listless fingers, her head turned toward the smeared glass.

Pete could smell stale sweat, hair lacquer, the damp pantyhose of the woman next to him who had slipped off her shoes.

The bus ground to a sighing halt and the door opened.

And then the girl appeared.

She walked down the aisle and took the seat in front of Ruth. She was young, small, slender, with tiny breasts and hips and round arms and calves. She wore a simple blue blouse, her hair was long and shining and she looked like she should smell of soap and something sweet: cream soda or talcum powder.

Ruth didn’t take her eyes off her. Pete watched her watching the girl as she turned to look out of the window, her clear skin flushed, her chin raised. She was on the verge of becoming a woman but she lacked those womanly trappings: lipstick, powder, cigarettes.

Pete looked at the girl and at Ruth’s pale face and then he realized she must be thinking of her daughter. This girl was just like Cindy, but Cindy grown older.

Apparently without realizing what she was doing, without any kind of conscious thought, Ruth stretched out an arm and stroked the soft cotton. As gently as falling blossom. The material was thin and the girl’s skin showed through it. Ruth stroked a loose strand of hair that flowed over that shoulder like water, fingered the long, cool smoothness of it, stared at the change in depth and color as the light danced over it, and then as it was jerked up and away.

“Hey,” said the girl, her face red. “Hey!”

Ruth’s hands flew up, white and tremulous as birds.

“Sorry. I’m so sorry. I thought . . . I thought you were someone else.”

She stumbled into the aisle and pulled the bell again and again until the driver yelled into his rearview mirror and brought the bus to a halt and shook his head at her.

The door hissed shut behind her and the bus moved on and Pete twisted to see her lonely figure grow smaller in the rear window as the long gray road stretched between them.


Pete was on his way back from lunch when Friedmann appeared in the doorway to his office and beckoned him over.

“Take a seat. What you working on right now, Wonicke?”

“Well, the Malone case.”

“That’s it?” Friedmann shook his head. “I can’t afford to leave you on that. We got too many other stories need attention.”

“Sir, it’s still news. Two unsolved murders.”

“Unsolved being the key word. Until the cops make an arrest, there’s nothing we got to tell readers that they want to hear. They close to pulling somebody in?”

“I don’t think so. But . . .”

“But nothing. You come back with a new angle or new information, we’ll talk. Look, you’ve been doing some good work lately. That piece you wrote about the father’s appeal—the contrast with the mother, that was nice. But now I want you on that Panty Burglar case in Jamaica.”

“The what?”

“I know. The Star gave the guy a name, it stuck. Series of burglaries going back a few weeks. Guy only steals women’s underwear.”

He took off his glasses and polished them on his tie. “It takes all kinds, right?”

“Jesus.”

Pete stared down at Friedmann’s desk, thinking. As Horowitz had said, this story could be huge—and he wanted to be there when it took off. He wanted to break the story of an arrest, or a conviction. Even—and he felt adrenaline rush through him at the prospect—even be the one to uncover evidence that might prove who the killer was.