What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman

long ago, the local news had been full of stories about the governor’s wife, who had to learn from her husband’s press secretary that she was being divorced. She had holed herself up in the governor’s mansion and refused to come out, sure that her husband would return to his senses. She had been a woman not unlike this one—Northwest Baltimore, Jewish, plump and well dressed, an integral part of her husband’s success. Affairs were a man’s perquisite, something that wives either tolerated or didn’t. The women in affairs were young and toothsome andunencumbered—secretaries and stewardesses, Goldie Hawn in Cactus Flower. Miriam couldn’t have an affair. She was a mother, a good one. Poor Mrs. Baumgarten. Her husband was clearly cheating on her, but she had lashed out blindly, settling on Miriam because she was a handy target.
    He dialed Miriam’s office number, and let it ring, but the receptionist didn’t pick up. Ah well, Miriam was probably still out at an open house, and the receptionist had left for the day. He would ask her about it tonight, something he should do more often anyway. Ask Miriam about her work. Because surely it was her work that had given her so much confidence recently. It was the commissions that accounted for the glow in her face, the bounce in her step, the tears in the bathroom late at night.
    The tears in the bathroom …but no, that was Sunny, poor sensitive Sunny, for whom ninth grade had been a torture of ostracism, all because he and Miriam had tried to fight the other parents over the bus route. At least that’s what he’d told himself when, sitting in his study late at night, he had heard those muffled sobs in the bathroom at the head of the stairs, the one that the whole family shared. He’d sat in his study, pretending to listen to music, pretending he was respecting the privacy of the crying female just a stair climb away.
    Dave tore the letter in pieces, grabbed his keys, and locked up, heading down the street to Monaghan’s Tavern, another Woodlawn establishment doing a booming business on the Saturday before Easter.

CHAPTER 10
    â€œY ou were supposed to stay away from me,” Sunny hissed at Heather after the usher dragged them both out of the movie theater and said they were banned for the day. “You promised.”
    â€œI got worried when you didn’t come back from the bathroom. I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”
    It wasn’t a lie, not exactly. Certainly Heather had wondered why Sunny had left fifteen minutes into Escape to Witch Mountain and not returned. And she’d been worried that Sunny was trying to dump her, so she had gone outside, looked in the bathroom, then sneaked into the other side, where the R-rated Chinatown was playing. Sunny must have been pulling this trick for a while, Heather figured, buying a ticket for the PG movie on one side of the theater, then using a bathroom visit to gain entrance to the R-rated one while no one was looking.
    She took a seat two rows back from Sunny, the same maneuver she’d used in Escape to Witch Mountain . (“It’s a free country,” she announced airily when Sunny had glared at her.) This time she’d gone undetected until the moment the little man had inserted his knife in the otherman’s nose. Then she had gasped, quite audibly, and Sunny had turned at the sound of her voice.
    Heather had assumed that Sunny would ignore her, rather than draw attention to both of them. But Sunny came back to where she was sitting and, in urgent whispers, told her that she had to leave immediately. Heather shook her head, pointing out that she was observing the rules that Sunny had set down. She wasn’t with her. She just happened to be at the same movie theater. Like she said, it was a free country. An old woman called the usher, and they were both thrown out when they couldn’t produce the proper ticket stubs.