by Jeff Abbott
“Rich now?” She pretended not to know.
“Jake started a software company. He was going to take it public—you know, sell the shares on the stock market. The stock went on sale several weeks after Bethany vanished. There had been talk that he’d cancel the initial public offering, but he refused to, even with my daughter missing. He made a mint. Then the company got bought by another software company for fifty million and he made even more.”
She took another sip of coffee; her slurp was loud and angry. She put down the coffee cup, and Mariah noticed her manicure was perfect, nails painted a light sky blue. “Bethany supported him with her work when he stayed at home and started writing those computer programs that turned into his company’s software. Then he got some initial angel investors, he started to grow it. Long hours, hard on both of them, all his extra money poured into the company. And I’m supposed to believe she takes off, right before he’s going to be a millionaire? Now, I don’t care about worldly goods, but she does. I mean, not in a bad way.” She looked toward heaven. “God forgive me. You know I love you, honey.”
Mariah shifted against the edge of the couch. She wasn’t comfortable with talking to the dead. No, she thought, you prefer to imagine them in food courts.
“You think Jake did something to her because he was about to be wealthy? Wouldn’t that endanger his taking his company public?”
“Money makes some people cruel and thoughtless. It made people feel sorry for him because he made it look like she left him.”
“Maybe you could tell me about that day. I know how painful it is.” And she saw Sharon look at her, as if measuring if she could comprehend the pain, and deciding that a girl whose mother had disappeared might have an inkling of what that pain was like.
“It’s a punishment, I think,” Sharon said suddenly. “Something we did before catches up to us. Our lives…the way we live them…” Tears came to her eyes.
“I never did anything to deserve losing my mom this way,” Mariah said, keeping her voice steady. “Neither did my mom.”
“God sees all. Knows all. In our hearts.” Sharon wiped away tears. Mariah knew she should offer the woman her hand, some comfort, but she was so bad at this. So she stared down at the coffee for a moment, then brought her gaze up to meet Sharon’s.
“Then God should punish me, not my mom,” Mariah said.
“If only it worked that way. I’m sorry. I don’t know you and I can’t judge you.” Implying, Mariah thought, that judgment might come with acquaintance. Sharon took a deep breath and her tone was calmer. “There’s no club for us, is there? No prayer meetings. No AA.”
“A guy I know, a crime podcaster, he runs a support group in Lakehaven for families dealing with this.”
“That Asian boy?”
“His name is Chad. Yes. It meets tomorrow night. I might go.” A sudden impulse took her. “You should come with me.”
“I couldn’t. It would do me no good. Because I know Jake did it, and all those other folks in that group, they don’t have any answers. Just a big mystery. I have answers. But no one who matters believes them. Except God. He knows the evil in Jake’s heart.”
“That day. What happened?” It would be a starting point at least.
“Bethany and Jake came over for dinner the night before—September third. I made her favorite. Lasagna and a salad. Soccer was on some cable sports channel I didn’t even know that I got, and Jake watched that. Soccer, it’s so boring. Bethany and I were in the kitchen and she told me, in a whisper, she was thinking of leaving Jake.”
“Did she say why?”
“No.” She paused. “For a moment, I was shocked, and then I was so mad at her. Why would she tell me when we couldn’t talk about it, with Jake there? And right before his company was going public and they’d be rich? It was like she had dropped a bomb. My hands were shaking. I had my issues with Jake, but marriage is a serious commitment, and I never thought…well, I didn’t think he’d beat on her or bullied her, or cheated on her. I didn’t have any reason to believe. I thought, well, he’s worked long hours on this startup, and she’s a young wife, and perhaps she’s not being patient and seeing that soon he’d have much more time for her. Bethany could be impulsive.” Sharon took a deep, fortifying breath. “So she whispers to me she’s leaving him, and I knew no details. And she promised me we’d just talk later. She asked, though, if she could stay with me, and I said of course. I would have thought she’d stay in the house and make him leave, but I think she just wanted to be at home with me.”
“How did she seem? Anxious, scared?”
“Uneasy. Not scared. Like she was taking a big step, but she was OK with it.”
Mariah pressed on, just trying to get a picture of those final hours. “So you all had dinner.”
Her earlier reluctance to talk had faded, and Mariah guessed she didn’t get to talk about this aspect of the case often. “Yes. Jake was checking his email on his iPhone all through dinner, which I hate, and Bethany was quiet. They seemed fine and I thought, Jake doesn’t know. He doesn’t know she’s leaving him. So I thought I’d make it easier for him when the hammer falls. I said nice things about Jake. Complimented his work ethic while he let my lasagna get cold on the plate what with his email and texting, and he just said, ‘uh-huh, uh-huh, thanks, Sharon,’ Said how proud I was of him, building that company from a dream and a loan. Thought Bethany might see she ought to slow down and not be rash, take a deep breath. It didn’t work. I tried to keep the conversation lively. But she was jumpy and he was distracted, and they didn’t stay long after dinner. When she hugged me goodbye she told me she’d explain it in a day or so and not to worry. I thought I should tell Andy. That if she needed to break the news to Jake that Andy should be there.” Her words had come out in a torrent and she pressed the back of her hand to her mouth.
“Andy?”
“Andrew Candolet. He’s a family friend. He and Bethany went to school and worked together.” She knotted her fingers together in her lap.
Mariah filed the name away in her head. “You thought Jake might take the news badly.”
“I thought he would be dignified, but you never know how a man takes the news his wife is leaving him…” She shook her head and took a long sip of coffee. “What if, what if, what if. You can kill yourself playing that game.” Now her voice shook.
“So what happened the next day?”
“According to Jake, at breakfast, she told him that she was leaving him. He said he was stunned, but he asked her not to go, and she said she was moving out. She left, with a small bag packed. He then went to work, like it was a normal day. We know from witnesses and video that Bethany went to their bank and withdrew a few hundred in cash—not really enough to last long. Then we don’t know where she was, but a couple of hours later she booked a Southwest flight online and got a last-minute ticket to Houston Hobby.” That was the smaller, regional airport for Houston. “Then the security cameras picked her up in Hobby and she vanished. Didn’t rent a car. Didn’t call a taxi or a rideshare on her phone. Never checked into a hotel.” She ran her palms along her legs, steadied them in her lap. “She never used her credit cards. Never called me or Andy. She would have let me know she was OK.” She was on the edge of tears. Mariah watched her. She knew she should offer her hand to the woman or put a comforting arm around her, but instead she stared at her own hands, clenched together. The only comfort, for real, after all this time, was the truth.
“Why Houston? Did she have friends there?”
“A few, from her college days, but none of them said they’d heard from her or seen her. They have no reason to lie.”
Unless Bethany asked them to. People could always find a reason to lie. “Are you from there? Or any other family?”
“No, no,” Sharon said.
“Could Jake have followed her to Houston and killed her?”
“I think maybe she knew something shady about his business. So, she decided at the last minute to run and h
ide down there, and soon enough he found her. He never said she told him she was going to Houston, but maybe she did. Or she used their credit card after she said she was leaving him and he was watching the activity. Maybe for Jake it was as easy as hiring someone to watch the airport, email a picture of her, and just wait for her to show up. He didn’t report her missing until the next day. He said she told him she wanted the divorce right before he left for work, and I can’t believe he went ahead and went to his office, but he did. But he excused himself after about an hour. He said he was so stunned he didn’t know what to do. These engineer types, I will never get them. He says, he claims that he drove over to Marble Falls.” This was a town about forty minutes from Austin, in the hill country. “His family had a lake house there, and he said he went and sat by the lake and thought about how to get her to change her mind, be a better husband to her. The next morning, he called here, looking for her, and that was when…we realized no one had heard from her. I didn’t know where she was.”
“You weren’t surprised when she didn’t show up at your house that day?”
“I assumed that whole day she hadn’t told him yet. Or she’d had second thoughts after our family dinner.” The regret in her voice rang like a chime. “About lunchtime I called her on her cell and she didn’t answer. The voicemail was left about the time her flight was leaving, so she would have had her phone in airplane mode. When she didn’t call back, I thought maybe she had changed her mind, or she couldn’t talk…I was trying not to interfere. Stay out of her business. Be a good mother.” Her voice broke again. “I shouldn’t have let her out of my sight. Should have been with her when she told him, gone with her, insisted on it, moved her things to our house. But no. I stayed out of it.” She wiped the back of her hand across her eyes.
Silence in the den, except for the ticking of an old clock on the mantel, surrounded by the pictures of the lost Bethany. “So, you don’t know why she went to Houston?”
Now she was quiet, for twenty long seconds, as if she’d said too much. Mariah got the sense that she didn’t talk much about this, and that words and ideas were boiling to the surface. “Obviously it had to be to get away from him. She told me that she felt life had gone sour for her in the past few months. Lots of things going wrong. She’d lost her job over some silliness, she’d lost her friends.” Sharon hugged herself, rubbed her arms as if cold.
“Lost her job and her friends? How?”
“Her friends got tired of her never calling them back, and there was a misunderstanding at work. She wouldn’t say what.” Sharon was lying, Mariah thought. She didn’t trust Mariah enough to give her a clear answer. Mariah didn’t push it. “She clearly felt her life had gone wrong. Maybe she just wanted a fresh start. Is that a terrible thing to say? I don’t know what was in her head. If she’d gone to church with me, this wouldn’t have ever happened. She would have stuck out the marriage.”
“Did you think Jake was behind this…losing her friends? Was he isolating her?”
“He wasn’t paying enough attention to her to isolate her. It was just…a bad streak. We all get a bad streak now and then. That’s why we need the Lord, to steady us on our journey.”
“Did you go to Houston to look for her?”
For a moment Sharon Blevins paled. “No. No. Jake did, I’m sure for show, and the police down there tried their best. I don’t…I don’t care for Houston. I’m not one for travel.” At this she got up and walked to the photos of her daughter sitting on the fireplace mantel, reaching out to touch one.
And Mariah, perhaps unfairly, thought, How could you not go look for her? What’s the matter with you?
She wondered if she should tell Sharon she’d met Jake. Quiet, charming, assured…but all that could be a lie. This woman knew him, far better than she did. But this woman was also blinded by grief, one that seemed stronger than Jake’s. But how Jake had managed all these various criminal machinations to eliminate his wife had not been explained.
“Was Jake abusive? Controlling?” Mariah asked.
“If he was, she didn’t tell me,” Sharon said. “I never saw a bruise. But he’s very smart. He could have undercut her in many ways.”
“Could she have had a boyfriend in Houston? Would she have told you if there was another man?” She felt a flush of shame asking this question, and she wasn’t sure why, the words sudden and sharp in her mind.
“If she did, she wouldn’t tell me. I wouldn’t approve. I mean, not while she was still married.” She smoothed her palms along her legs. “I don’t mean to sound harsh. I wish she had told me. She could have.”
“Perhaps she didn’t want to upset you.” Or be judged.
“The police didn’t find any evidence she’d been having an affair.”
“There are two hours where she’s unaccounted for.”
“Yes.”
“Where do you think she was? She gets cash, she’s leaving her husband—why doesn’t she leave then? There are flights to Houston every hour. Why does she wait?”
“I don’t know!” Sharon said, her voice a sudden, jagged scream. “I don’t know!”
11
CRAIG GOT INTO the shower, where he did his best thinking. OK, what was he going to do when he found the person tormenting him? Ask them to stop? Shame them? Scare them so badly they never looked his or Mariah’s way again?
Hurt them?
As he toweled off, his house phone rang. He went into his bedroom and picked up the cordless, not recognizing the number, but hitting Answer.
“I thought you should know, sir, that your wife was taken by aliens,” a woman’s voice said, breathy and soft-pitched.
“Aliens. You mean aliens from another world.”
“Yes, Mr. Dunning.”
“I haven’t gotten that one in a while,” he said. “What a refreshing theory. Thanks for sharing it with me and making a joke of my grief.” He kept his voice steady.
“It’s true. I saw her taken.”
For a moment the words were a knife in his heart, his brain. “Who is this?”
“A golden beam of light lifted her from her car and into the saucer.”
“Saucers don’t seem the most aerodynamically smart choice for spacecraft,” he said, and the woman, in her soft, polite voice, directed him to commit a physically impossible act and hung up.
He put the phone down. There hadn’t been a prank call for weeks. Now the note and the rock, and now this. Something had happened. Something had shifted. He could dismiss the deranged caller much more easily than the rock with the message. That scared him. It promised that the conversation hadn’t ended yet.
The phone rang again. He almost didn’t answer, but he did when he saw LAKEHAVEN PD on the screen.
“Craig? This is Dennis Broussard. I’d like you to stop by today and talk to us.”
“About what? I don’t know if my lawyer will be available on such short notice.”
“You don’t need a lawyer, Craig. This is about your daughter.”
The fist that formed around his heart whenever he talked to the police tightened. “About what?”
“It would be better in person. Could you stop by in, say, an hour?” Like Chief Broussard knew Craig wasn’t busy, just sitting in his own house, watching what was left of his life tick away. “I just would like to talk to you.”
“Yes,” Craig Dunning heard himself say. “I’ll be there in an hour.” He hung up. Leo put his head against Craig’s leg, anxious to be petted. Craig wanted to tell him it would be okay. But he didn’t know.
12
I’M SORRY. I’M so sorry,” Mariah said.
Sharon took a deep breath. “I just…I just wish I knew the answers.”
“I pushed you. I shouldn’t have.”
“I should be tougher,” Sharon said. “Some days I am. Others, I’m not.” She tried a smile.
Mariah refilled Sharon’s coffee cup, added cream and sugar; she’d noticed how Sharon fixed her own coffee before. Sharon nodded her t
hanks and took the mug into her hands.
“I’m fine,” Sharon said. “OK. To answer your question on where she was, I think maybe those hours, she was with Jake. Maybe they talked. Maybe he begged her to stay. Maybe she thought of giving him another chance but she didn’t. And so she left and it ate at him and then he waited for her to get to Houston, so he’d have an alibi, and he got someone to”—she could hardly form the words—“take her.”
“Do you think he knows criminals who would commit a kidnapping on short notice?” She tried to keep her tone…well, not incredulous.
She shrugged off this bit of logic. “I don’t know that he doesn’t.”
It wasn’t an answer. The silence between them grew.
“Tell me about her and Jake.” Mariah was starting to see the folly of thinking this case had anything to do with her mother. These lives had never intersected. But now she wanted to know. This was still a tragedy parallel to her own.
Sharon set down the half-full coffee mug. “From the start: Bethany was crazy about Jake. I couldn’t quite see what the attraction was. He was nice-looking, sure, and he had a real good job. Computer security. But quiet. Too quiet, for me.” She risked a smile. “Not quiet like a strong and silent type, like her daddy. But quiet like a dirty secret.” For a moment she stopped and took a deep breath. “Jake would sit here and smile at me, and I could tell I wasn’t good enough for him. I guess because he had advanced degrees and I don’t. Or maybe it’s a matter of having faith. I never tried to preach at him or convert him. I never looked down on him. Sometimes he acted like he was rescuing Bethany from a sorry life, which wasn’t true.” She stopped, bit at her lip. “But Bethany had her cap set for him, and she loved him. I gritted my teeth and thought at the least they’d make cute grandbabies, so I could tolerate him having an ego.” She leaned forward. “You know, Andy Candolet took Jake aside before the wedding and said if Jake ever hurt her, there’d be hell to pay from all of Bethany’s friends. And you know what Jake said?”
