What the Dead Know

In March 2005, an unidentified woman driving along the Baltimore Beltway loses control on an oil slick, sideswipes an SUV, and flees the scene. A patrol officer finds her walking along the shoulder of Interstate 70, injured and without identification. The car is registered to a Penelope Jackson of North Carolina, but the woman denies being Penelope. Instead, she makes a startling claim: She is one of the Bethany girls, two sisters who vanished from Security Square Mall in Baltimore 30 years earlier.

At St. Agnes Hospital, she refuses to say more until she has legal representation. Kay Sullivan, a hospital social worker, arranges for Gloria Bustamante, a prominent defense attorney, to represent the woman. Gloria introduces her to Baltimore County homicide detective Kevin Infante as Heather Bethany, the younger of the two missing sisters. Through tears, the woman says her older sister, Sunny, was murdered shortly after they were taken. She refuses to reveal her current identity, insisting she wants to preserve the anonymous life she has built. She also claims that a real police officer lured her away from the mall, a detail Gloria uses as leverage to keep the woman out of jail while the investigation proceeds.

The novel interweaves this present-day investigation with flashbacks to the Bethany family's life in 1975. Dave Bethany, the girls' idealistic father, runs a failing gift shop called The Man with the Blue Guitar. His wife, Miriam, is secretly having an affair with her boss, Jeff Baumgarten. On the Saturday the girls disappear, Dave insists that 15-year-old Sunny bring 11-year-old Heather along to the mall. Sunny resents the intrusion and bribes Heather to stay away. At the mall, Sunny sneaks into an R-rated movie; Heather follows, and both are ejected. They separate angrily. Heather wanders the corridors alone, at one point watching a music teacher play organ at a store. Meanwhile, Dave discovers Miriam's affair through an anonymous note left at his shop by Baumgarten's wife and closes early to drink at a local tavern. When Dave arrives at the mall at 5:30 to pick up the girls, neither one is there.

In the present, Infante pursues leads with growing skepticism. He visits retired detective Chet Willoughby, who originally investigated the case and remains haunted by it. Willoughby reveals that a music teacher named Roy Pincharelli, who worked weekends at the mall, claimed to have seen Heather and noticed a man grab her arm. Willoughby advises finding the girls' mother, Miriam, now believed to be living in Mexico. The woman offers a specific lead: a stone farmhouse on Old Town Road in Pennsylvania, where she says her sister is buried beneath a cherry tree. When Infante drives to the address, the property has been razed and replaced by a housing development. Nancy Porter, Infante's former partner now working cold cases, traces the property records to Stan Dunham, a retired Baltimore County police sergeant. She also connects Dunham's son, Tony, to a fatal house fire in Georgia. Tony's girlfriend at the time was Penelope Jackson, whose car the mystery woman was driving.

Periodic flashbacks reveal the aftermath of the disappearance across the decades. Dave and Miriam's marriage crumbles under grief and mutual blame. A key revelation emerges: Sunny and Heather were adopted. Their biological mother, Sally Turner, was killed by their biological father in a murder-suicide when Sunny was three and Heather was an infant. Dave and Miriam, family friends of the Turners, had taken the girls in through a guardianship arrangement. By 1983, Dave lives alone, his store ironically thriving from the publicity, while Miriam has reinvented herself in Austin, Texas, under her maiden name, Toles. Dave dies by suicide in 1989, hanging himself from the elm tree where the girls' tire swing once hung. Miriam relocates to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where she works in a folk-art gallery and keeps a scrap of Heather's old blanket framed on her nightstand.

Intercut with these family chapters are passages from the captive girl's perspective. She lives under the name Ruth on a Pennsylvania farm, attending a parish school and enduring nightly sexual abuse from Tony Dunham while his mother, Irene, looks the other way. Stan Dunham, who engineered her captivity, is both her jailer and her intermittent protector. At 18, after Tony nearly kills her, Stan puts her on a bus with a new identity and $5,000, and later arranges a modest annuity in her name. She drifts through cities under a succession of stolen names, each borrowed from a child who died young, working low-level jobs and avoiding connection with anyone.

As the investigation intensifies, the woman agrees to a formal interview. Nancy questions her while Willoughby and the detectives observe. She describes the abduction in detail and correctly identifies Heather's purse, but fails to mention seeing the music teacher, a discrepancy the investigators note. When Nancy reveals that Tony Dunham is dead, the woman blurts out his first name, which Nancy had not provided, exposing her prior knowledge of the family. Miriam, contacted in Mexico, flies to Baltimore.

Infante and Willoughby search Stan Dunham's hospice room and find school records for a girl named Ruth Leibig and a marriage certificate dated 1979 between Ruth Leibig and Tony Dunham. Willoughby spots a critical discrepancy: The diploma is from 1979, but Heather Bethany would have been only 16 that year, too young to have graduated. The woman cannot be Heather.

When the woman learns she will face Miriam, she panics and climbs out a bathroom window. Nancy intercepts her. At the Public Safety Building, Miriam takes the woman's hand and pushes up her sleeve to reveal a faint scar from a childhood vaccination, a wound unique to one daughter. She says, "Oh, Sunny, what in the world is going on?"

Sunny then tells the truth. At 15, she had been secretly romanced by Tony Dunham, the 23-year-old son of the bus company owner, who drove her school route as a substitute and cultivated the relationship through private conversations and pop music. He proposed elopement, claiming they could marry without parental consent, and she agreed to meet him at the mall. When Heather caught them together and threatened to tell their parents, they brought her along. There was no wedding; the courthouse was closed, and Tony had booked a motel room. While Sunny went to a nearby diner for food, Tony killed Heather. Stan Dunham arrived, told Sunny she would be blamed and charged as an accessory, and offered her a new life under a false name. Terrified and guilt-stricken, Sunny followed him into years of captivity and violence.

The police craft a public statement attributing Heather's murder to Tony Dunham and his parents' conspiracy, while protecting Sunny's current identity as Cameron "Ketch" Heinz, an IT specialist in Reston, Virginia. The novel reveals that shortly before the car accident, Penelope Jackson had approached Sunny, having learned from Tony about the murder and Sunny's annuity from Stan. Penelope demanded money and a new identity in exchange for silence, and Sunny complied. Sunny was driving Penelope's car back through Baltimore when the accident occurred. Whether Penelope set the fire that killed Tony remains unresolved.

In the novel's final section, Sunny travels to Mexico to visit Miriam at her gallery. Over several days, mother and daughter cautiously rebuild their relationship, sharing the stories of their separate decades. Sunny asks if she caused her parents' divorce, and Miriam tells her that no child is ever at fault. When Sunny wonders whether Heather would forgive her, Miriam assures her that Heather would know her sister never wished her harm. The novel closes with Sunny telling her mother she is hungry, and the two women walk arm in arm into the bright streets of San Miguel de Allende, together at last.