by Jeff Abbott
“Not to write about family stuff. That’s private. It could be hurtful. I think she should have written children’s books. Cheerful stuff, you know?”
“Was she going to write about her father?”
“Oh,” Sharon said in a small voice. “I guess Julie or Andy told you he passed…by his own hand.” The last four words felt like little jabs. Recriminations that Mariah had raised the topic.
“Yes. And that Bethany found him.”
“You know, people can overcome things.” The words came out in a rush, a flood. “Through kindness. Through prayer. Through…whatever centers your soul. For me it’s the Bible, and for others, it’s whatever. Bethany wasn’t permanently damaged by what her father did. I’m sure she wasn’t.”
“I’m so sorry. It must have been so terrible for you both.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help to him. See it coming. Spared my daughter the whole ordeal.”
What about your ordeal? Or his? She didn’t even say she’d wished she’d saved her husband, Mariah thought. She tested the water. “There was no doubt it was suicide?”
Sharon’s eyes went frosty. “What do you mean, dear?”
“It might have been an accident? He didn’t realize what he was doing?”
“Oh.” She blinked. “I thought you were suggesting the unthinkable.” Steel now, under the sugared tone.
“Oh, no,” Mariah said. “I didn’t mean that.”
“No one would have wanted to hurt Hal. No one. We had a good, quiet life. He shouldn’t have done it where Bethany would find him. I think he thought I would. He could have gone off somewhere, let a stranger or the police find him. It would have been better.”
“Of course.” Mariah didn’t know what to say. “Did you have any other children?” she asked. Maybe Penny was a sibling.
“No, Bethany was our only blessing. Why?”
“I just wondered.”
Sharon seemed to study her face and Mariah realized she’d made a mistake with this woman. Two hard comments in a row, and Sharon was now suspicious of her. She decided to lob Sharon’s favorite target.
“Tomorrow I’m going to see if I can meet with Jake.”
“I want you to be careful.” Now Sharon took Mariah’s hand into her small, dry palm. “I want you to call me and let me know you’re OK after you see him.”
“You really hate him.”
She lowered her gaze for a moment. “If he didn’t kill her, he drove her away. He drove her to whatever fate she met. So yes, I hate him.” Sharon cleared her throat. “Do you want some hot milk to help you sleep?”
“You got anything stronger?” Mariah asked, before realizing she shouldn’t.
Sharon’s hand tensed in hers. “I don’t keep liquor in this house.”
She was embarrassed. “I think I can fall asleep now. I’m sorry I was a bother.”
“You remind me of her. Of my girl. The stubbornness.” She reached out and touched Mariah’s cheek. “I feel God brought you to me for a reason. I know that sounds like a bad country song. I just wish…I just wish this hadn’t happened to us. To our families.”
And she started, quietly, to cry then, and Mariah didn’t know what to do, but she put her arms around Sharon and held her until the weeping stopped. Her own face burned with unshed tears. The dream thing pointing past her, her turning to see what was there and always waking with a scream and never knowing who stood behind her. She wanted to cry, too, but she didn’t.
Sharon wiped at her eyes and got up, trying to smile.
“Mariah,” Sharon said. “Tomorrow you’ll face evil when you see Jake. Be strong. Know that I stand with you.”
Jake, smiling and laughing at trivia night. A nice guy. Or pure evil.
From a woman who didn’t seem that sorry her husband was dead.
Mariah slid farther down into the sheets. From the door, Sharon smiled at her and turned off the lights.
24
THE NEXT MORNING, Mariah got up and had coffee with a subdued Sharon. Mariah’s clothes were clean since Sharon had done her laundry for her last night, so she didn’t need to run home to change. She showered and brushed her teeth with the fresh toothbrush Sharon had given her last night.
“I want you to be careful around Jake,” Sharon said. She seemed genuinely unsettled at the idea of Mariah seeing him.
“I will. I know he’s into trivia game night at a local bar; I saw that on his Faceplace page…I thought that might be a good place to talk to him. People would be around, since you’re worried.”
“Well,” Sharon said, with a small smile that wasn’t entirely happy. “Aren’t you the clever girl? Will you let me know what happens? Have some more coffee.”
* * *
Mariah drove down from north Austin, along Loop 360, to her mother’s old office in a building on the cliffs above the ribbon of Lake Austin. It was strange to be here; she had not come here since the company had asked Craig to come gather Beth’s belongings after she had been missing for three months—“You understand, Craig, we’re all holding out hope, but we’re a growing company and we need the space”—and so she and her dad had driven in complete silence up here, and they had cleaned out Mom’s office: photos of their family on vacation at Disney World, of a trip to Hawaii, of Mariah graduating from Lakehaven High School and posing in front of DKR Memorial Stadium before a Longhorns football game. A wedding picture of Beth and Craig, looking gloriously happy in the summer sun. Her two plants she’d managed to not let die—someone had watered them since she vanished. A bunch of framed sales certificates on the wall. A mock hammer, made of rubber, from when she’d “put the hammer down” in sales meetings to keep the staff on topic. Together the two of them had boxed up that aspect of her life, her sales career, the job she loved, people drifting by, not knowing what to say except they were so sorry and everyone loved Beth and what can we do for you? Mariah trying and failing not to cry; Craig hardly even able to look at Mariah as he put these souvenirs of her work life into the plain cardboard box.
You’re giving up on her. You think she’s dead. Mariah had thought at them all, and the anger had burned bright inside of her.
Now she was back and she told the receptionist—who remembered her and came around the desk to give her a welcome hug—that she was here to see the CEO, Mike Alderson, but no, she didn’t have an appointment. He had run a couple of different software companies in Lakehaven—much of the wealth in the suburb was tied to the technology industry—and had taken the CEO position at Acrys Networks after her mother had disappeared. She had not met him before. The receptionist said he was in a meeting, but she’d let him know Mariah was here. She sat down and felt tense every time someone walked by, bracing herself if they were going to say Oh aren’t you Beth’s daughter, how are you, what are you doing here? But no one spoke to her, and somehow that was worse. She told herself they were all new employees. It was clearly a growing company.
Alderson came out to the lobby twenty minutes later.
“Ms. Dunning. Hello.” He offered her a hand to shake. “I’m Mike Alderson.”
“Yes. I need to ask an unusual favor. You might know that my mother used to work here…well, what happened was…”
“I know about your mother and I’m so sorry. People here speak of her always with such high regard. Please come back to my office.”
She followed Alderson to his office. He shut the door behind her.
“I’ve come to ask an unusual favor,” she said. “I’d like a digitized scan of all the receipts from the last year of my mom’s business travel. Especially any receipts from the WebCon conference that year, and the year before. Also, her emails.”
He blinked. “May I ask why?”
Because my mother’s missing and you should just give it to me, she thought, but instead she said, “I am pursuing a lead related to her disappearance.”
The moment she said it she knew she’d made a mistake. His expression of concern went guarded.
> He frowned slightly. “You are pursuing this? You?”
Like it couldn’t be her business. “Me,” she said, her voice firm.
“Not the police?”
“The police aren’t doing as much as people assume,” she said. “Nothing against them. But I am following up on a lead, and I have already told Lakehaven’s chief of police I’m following up on this lead.”
“A lead that you think is in her corporate emails.”
“I’m trying to establish if she knew someone.”
“What’s their name?” he pressed.
“I don’t want to make an accusation against someone. Are you going to give me her emails or not?” she asked, a bit too abruptly.
Alderson tapped his fingers along his desk. “I never knew your mother, but I know she was much loved here.”
“Thank you.” She could feel the blow-off beginning.
“That said, without a warrant, I’m not sure that I could release corporate records.”
“They’re just bar and restaurant receipts, and old emails,” she said. “They’re nothing secret. I’ll sign any confidentiality agreement you could want.”
“If you could tell me how you wanted to use them…”
“I want to establish if she had contact with another person.” She wouldn’t explain more than that.
“Is this about a coworker of hers?”
“No, it’s not.” She cleared her throat. “No one with ties to Acrys Networks. Please.”
“Of course I want to help you. So let me consult with my lawyers…”
Something in her snapped. She recognized it, her temper surging at a slight provocation. “Fine,” she said, getting out her phone. “Let me live-tweet that you are refusing to turn over nonconfidential records that could lead to my mother’s kidnapper. Is your PR staff busy today? They will be. People get so frothy on the internet.”
His polite smile vanished. “I won’t be intimidated, Ms. Dunning, by some sort of social media threat.”
“I won’t be put off, Mr. Alderson. Do you have a mother?” And she could see the question was like a slap across his face. She didn’t care. “Ask your lawyer, right now, please. Or, better yet, ask your staff if they would like to help catch the man who kidnapped Beth Dunning. I could just go down the hall and ask all the people who loved my mom as to whether you should help me.”
His voice softened. “I cannot imagine how upset you are…”
“Please. Please help me. If you won’t give them to me let me look through them. I’ll sit in a corner and do it, nothing has to leave the office. Or put them on a copy-protected drive and I’ll search it and I’ll bring it back to you. I’m just trying to find my mother…find what happened to her.”
“Did your father send you?” The question, asked gently, but sharp as a knife.
“Why?” she asked, her voice full of dread.
“He made the same request six months after your mom vanished. We knew he was a suspect, so we declined. But we did give them to the police. They never told us if they found anything; they never asked us further questions about her work contacts, so I assume they didn’t.” He was offering her this information as a truce, she saw. “So…they’ve already checked it. It’s a dead end. I don’t know what you think you’ll find.”
“My dad never told me he asked for her emails. He doesn’t know that I’m here.”
“Wait here, just one moment,” he said, flustered. He left the office.
She waited. She felt cold. This was useless.
She waited for thirty minutes.
Mike Alderson came back in, with the Acrys chief information officer, a woman named Karen Sellers who had known her mother for years. Karen was holding a flash drive. “Hello, Mariah. Here’s all your mom’s receipts and emails. All of them. We still had a master file with all the scans and I just burned them for you.”
“Thank you so much,” Mariah said. “Thank you.”
“I hope this helps you,” Karen said. She put the drive into Mariah’s palm.
“Yes, thank you.” She folded her hands around the flash drive, like it was a precious treasure.
Mike Alderson nodded. “I wasn’t trying to be difficult, Mariah. Karen told me it would be OK to trust you.”
“I’m sorry I got upset. Thank you,” she said. “Hey, since you’re all in the same industry, do you know a man named Jake Curtis? He sold a company to DataMarvel.”
She thought she saw Karen’s mouth tighten slightly. “Yes, I’ve met him, haven’t you, Mike?”
“Sure, I’ve met him.”
“What’s he like?” Mariah asked.
Karen folded her arms and glanced at Alderson. “Whoa. Stop. Is Jake Curtis somehow connected to your mom’s disappearance?”
“Oh, no. Not at all. I just met him recently through my app design business.” She hadn’t thought this through, and suddenly words from her mother rang hard in her ear: no gossip network can compare with the Austin software community.
“Well, Jake’s a very bright guy,” Mike said. “He’s overcome a lot. His wife vanished…” And then they both looked at her. Making the connection. Mariah said nothing.
“But it wasn’t a kidnapping. Jake’s wife left him, right?” Karen said.
Leave, Mariah thought. Now. Before he worries helping me could backfire on him in this small world. “Thank you for this.” She shook their hands again and went out to the parking garage.
She was opening her car door when she heard footsteps behind her. Karen, breathless, hurrying across the garage. “Hey. I just wanted you to know…I think of your mom every day. Every day. We all miss her so much. I know it’s nothing compared to what you and your dad feel, but she is missed here. Her smile, her intelligence, her kindness.”
Mariah exhaled a long breath. “Thank you for telling me that.”
“So. Jake Curtis,” Karen said.
“What about him?”
“He’s…did you really just ask because you casually met him? Not my business, I know…”
“We met once; he wouldn’t remember me I’m sure,” Mariah said.
“OK. We were going to do a partnership deal with them. This was a few months ago. And, um, given that his wife vanished, there was some reluctance with our team. I mean, I don’t know how to say this and not hurt you.”
“It’s all right. Hurt me.”
“Because the same things could be said about your dad.”
“Just say what you want to say.”
“I heard your mom and your dad arguing. Well, she told me it was your dad, and the police checked the phone records here, and the call came from his cell phone. He’d asked her if she was having an affair. This was the day she vanished.”
“Did she tell you?”
“I walked into her office as she said, into the phone, ‘No, Craig, I am not having an affair!’” Karen didn’t seem to know where to put her hands. “She got off the phone and rolled her eyes at me, but she was shaken. I’m sorry.”
“An argument doesn’t mean anything.”
“Oh, honey,” Karen said. “I wish it didn’t.”
“So what does this have to do with Jake?”
“People didn’t want to work with him because, well, what if it came out that he was involved in his wife’s disappearance? I mean, no one wants to buy product from a guy who might have killed his wife, or had her killed.”
“So, y’all didn’t want to work with him.”
“We knew there were potential risks. And we declined, after a lot of internal arguing.” She swallowed. “A day after we told him no, the car of our COO was vandalized, all his tires slashed, mirrors broken. The next day, same thing to our then CEO’s Porsche.”
“And you thought Jake Curtis did this? It could have been another employee at his company.”
“It seemed more than a coincidence. And he had the most at stake. Us working with him would have sent another message to software companies that we were confident in partnering with him, that he a
nd his company weren’t going anywhere. But we had no proof. But just know…I don’t think he’s a good guy.”
The vandalism made her think of Bethany’s misfortunes.
“Thanks for telling me, Karen.”
“Sure. You mentioned you were doing app design?”
“I run a small web and app design firm. The firm is, well, me.”
“I’m always looking for bright people”—Oh no, oh no—“and I know it would be strange to work where your mom did…”
“I don’t think I could do that,” Mariah said in a rush. She suddenly wanted to be in the car.
Karen gently took her hand. “I totally understand. But listen to me. We’re moving to new offices next month. It wouldn’t be like working in the same space where she did.”
That wouldn’t be bad. And she wouldn’t have to explain so often. “Um, OK. Regular work is hard for me, what with taking care of my dad and such.” Now she couldn’t look at Karen. She felt a mix of terror and gratitude. It was like seeing a flicker of the life like she’d thought she’d have, before Mom eclipsed everything else.
“Mariah. I have no business to say this, but I will. You need to get on with your life.”
“I hear you,” Mariah said. She’d found this brief phrase to be very useful in ending conversations full of unsolicited advice.
“I’m just saying…you need to find a purpose for yourself rather than proving everyone wrong about your dad, or finding out what happened to your mom. Not every mystery is solved.”
Five words that felt like short, sharp jabs in her heart.
And then an image, like from her dream, Mom stepping back, receding from her, Mariah desperately holding on to her arms, trying to keep her close. Nausea swept over her, as it often did when she had this kind of conversation.
Mariah remembered how awkward it had seemed when she and her father came to collect her mother’s belongings. That people had been kind to her, naturally, but had averted their gaze from her dad. She remembered Karen, saying, in a flat voice when she spoke to Craig, “I’m very sorry for your loss.” Like she didn’t mean it, but she couldn’t not mean it. She thought it was grief. Now she realized that no one here had wanted her father around, even for the thirty minutes it had taken for them to collect her belongings, under the eye of a security officer.
