I'd Know You Anywhere: A Novel by Laura Lippman

had not yet been exhumed, but as soon as it was uncovered, they would know it wasn’t her. The body had probably already been unearthedand identified, while he sat here with scorched coffee and runny eggs.
    He was in a truck stop in western Maryland, near the fork where one had to choose whether to keep going west, toward Cumberland, or head north into Pennsylvania. East, toward Baltimore, was out of the question. Head north, head north, head north, his brain told him, then west . But his truck had West Virginia plates, and it was a funny thing, one didn’t see them much on the open road, away from his home state. And he had been looking for those blue-and-gold plates, he realized. True, they probably weren’t quite as rare on the Ohio Turnpike, but he was still reluctant to go that way, in part because he had never been that way. He wasn’t adventurous, he realized now. He thought he had yearned to travel, to see places far beyond where he grew up, but now all he wanted was to go home. Only he couldn’t. Not with her, and maybe not at all, ever again. What would he tell his parents about the time he went missing? Whatever he did with her, he would have to answer a lot of questions.
    Elizabeth was flipping through the selections on the mini-jukebox set up on the table. Just thirty-six hours into their acquaintance, as he thought of it, she had already learned to speak when spoken to, not to yammer away about every little thing in her head. She had good manners, actually. This morning, she had ordered scrambled eggs and an English muffin, but accepted without complaint the fried eggs and wheat toast that came in their place. The waitress was a knockout in training, with flame-colored hair and a terrific figure, and Walter could tell she was used to not getting things right and facing no consequences. He had wanted to call her back, dress her down, but Elizabeth had said, “No, I’m fine.” It was clear from how she nibbled only the whites around the yolk that she wasn’t fine, but he admired her niceness. The waitress, all of nineteen or twenty, looked throughhim. Did she think Elizabeth was his girlfriend? Or that he was her father? Brother and sister, he decided. That would be the most believable play, the simplest.
    The smarter move, he knew, would be to kill her. Kill her, get rid of the body—don’t even bother to dig a grave this time, just leave her somewhere inaccessible, there was still plenty of wilderness out here—and go home. Tell his folks he’d been on a fishing trip, had some car trouble, had to wait for a part, didn’t want to call collect and couldn’t afford to dial long-distance because he was saving every penny to pay the mechanic in cash. There was nothing to connect the girl back in Patapsco State Park to him, or any other girl. This girl was the only one who could hurt him.
    Yet there was something about her, struggling to choke down her eggs, that reminded him of someone. She’s like me, he thought. She’s polite and nice, she does her best, and people don’t hear her, don’t pay attention.
    â€œDo you have a boyfriend?” he asked.
    She was in the habit of thinking before she answered him. He realized this was partly because she was weighing everything she said, intent on pleasing him. That was good.
    â€œNo,” she said. “Not yet.”
    â€œWell, how old are you?”
    â€œFifteen.”
    â€œThat’s too young for a boyfriend.” He knew that he had attempted to go with girls her age, or not much older, but there was fifteen and then there was fifteen. She was the first kind.
    â€œThere was a boy, at this camp I went to last summer, and we were kind of boyfriend and girlfriend, but it doesn’t really count at camp because you don’t make plans.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?” He honestly didn’t have a clue what she meant, and he hoped her answer might shed some light on one of