Every Secret Thing: A Novel
Laura Lippman
Language: English
Pages: 448
ISBN: 006207489X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From critically acclaimed, multiple-award winner Laura Lippman comes a riveting story of love and murder, guilt and innocence.
Two little girls banished from a neighborhood birthday party find an abandoned stroller with an infant inside on an unfamiliar Baltimore street. What happens next is shocking and terrible, causing the irreparable devastation of three separate families.
Seven years later, Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller, now eighteen, are released from “kid prison” to begin their lives over again. But the secrets swirling around the original crime continue to haunt the parents, the lawyers, the police, and all the adults in Alice and Ronnie’s lives. And now another child has disappeared, under freakishly similar circumstances.
hadn’t offered anything else. “You want me to take that up to eleven?” Infante asked Nancy now. “Yeah,” Nancy said. “Yeah, that would be great.” “What was that about?” Lenhardt asked once Infante had left. “An earring. We found it in the stairwell. Turns out that there was a malfunctioning video camera outside one of the Value City exits. Mall management took it down and pretended it wasn’t there because they thought the mom might sue them.” “It’s a long shot that the lab will recover
Nancy. But it was four years ago, in a different department. Everyone else has forgotten about it. Except you.” A stray comment from Infante, one that hadn’t made much of an impression at the time, came back to Nancy. “Sarge, will you tell me about the Epstein case?” “No.” “No?” She might have expected “not now” or “over a beer,” but it had never occurred to her that Lenhardt would refuse to answer one of his detective’s questions. “No. I put it out of my head, and I’m not going to put it
Alice always got her way, in the end. You be the daddy and I’ll be the mommy and this is our baby. That was how the game had begun, and it was only a game at first. They were going to take care of the baby they had found. She lived in a big house, Alice said. Her parents would probably give them a lot of money for finding her and keeping her safe. But it might take a day or two before a reward was offered, so they had to take good care of her until then. How much money? Ronnie had wondered.
you gave her a year-long course. Her parents’ VCR had been flashing 12:00 for about a decade now. Still, she had been getting a lot of wrong numbers of late, for some girl at Kenwood High whose number was one digit off from hers. They hadn’t text-messaged before now, but it was probably inevitable. Nancy was only twenty-eight, but she already had the habit of shaking her head and thinking, “Those kids.” She couldn’t understand their desire for access, for 24/7 connectedness, their need to always
P.M. closing. The rest of the week, Ronnie’s shift ended without complaint, but Saturdays always saw some last-minute person, usually a woman, harried and disorganized. For all that, and despite the crummy pay and early morning hours, Ronnie liked the Bagel Barn. On weekdays, once the morning rush ended, it was a gentle place that ran to solitary, undemanding folks who seemed to have a lot of time to sit and stare out the window while their coffee cooled. She worked the cash register, which paid