The Three Beths

by Jeff Abbott

  Mariah took a sip of her margarita. She hated talking about it, like words could re-create the horror and fear she’d felt. “Yes, but the day before we fought.”

  “Over?”

  “I had been…inattentive to my grades.”

  “Her words or yours?”

  “Hers. I was having a lot of fun. Not studying. It was unpleasant. I had gotten into a fight with another girl at a party. Over nothing, it was so stupid, it was so embarrassing.”

  “A physical fight?” he asked.

  She felt shame redden her face. “I have a temper, and it got the best of me. Mom told me I was a disappointment.” She put the straw back in her mouth, slugged frozen margarita down her throat. “I told her she was a crappy mother who was always gone and cared more about closing deals than time with me. Funny to think some of the times she was gone she was with your wife instead.”

  “You didn’t mean that she was a bad mother.”

  Why are you doing this, Mom?

  Words in her head. His voice cut through the whisper in her brain. “And that day?”

  “It’s kind of a haze. Some things I remember perfectly, and others are like they’re on the other side of a grease-smeared window. Does that makes sense?”

  “Perfect sense,” he said. “It’s the same for me. And no one believes it.”

  She stabbed the straw back into the margarita. “This is what my father told me: they had a normal morning, got up, breakfast together, both left for work. The night before she called me at my apartment down by UT to see if I was feeling better. I’d been sick, really sick, with a virus, but she assumed at first it was a hangover.” Her voice broke for a minute. “I was crying, I was so sick with it. Fever, chills, that feeling when you might hallucinate at any minute. Mom felt terrible for not believing me at first and she told me to come home and let her take care of me. I remember saying ‘Yes, please, can I come home?’ I was taking painkillers for the aches. I was already on meds for anxiety because we’d been arguing. Probably overmedicated.” She took a breath. “I hardly remember driving home, and it’s only twenty minutes. I wish I hadn’t been on the meds. Everything would be clearer, right?”

  He nodded after a moment.

  She continued: “I came home, went straight to bed, woke up early the next morning, took more meds because I still felt awful, and went back to sleep. My dad works downtown. He had the longer commute, so he tended to leave first in the morning. He did. He said he kissed her goodbye. We know the rest from her digital trail. And from witnesses. She stopped at a Starbucks for a latte, chatted with another mom she knew from volunteering at my old high school. She got to work at her normal time, around eight. She had a sales meeting at eight thirty with the VP of sales.” Her voice wavered. “Nothing special, reviewing accounts, sales goals. She mentioned she’d called home later that morning, talked to me. I was at the house, in my old bed, sleeping. She offered to come home and fix me soup…I told her I could do it.” She bit down on her own lip. “If I had said yes, let her mommy me, she would have come home and none of this would have happened, but I just wanted to sleep.”

  “You can’t think that way,” Jake said. “You cannot.”

  Revisiting that day was like walking over shards. She forced herself to continue. “Mom then responded to emails, she made some phone calls to prospects, setting up appointments for the next week when she was heading to Dallas. She went to another meeting on a new product plan. I’ve learned she had an argument with my dad on the phone, denying that she was having an affair—the company CIO told me this, and she made reference to meeting my dad somewhere. She told the sales team assistant that she was heading out for lunch, but she didn’t mention going with anyone. Sometimes she came home for lunch. There wasn’t a lunch appointment on her schedule. She got in her car and she left. I think everyone assumed she came home to check on me. But she didn’t. The office missed her because she had one meeting that afternoon, and it wasn’t like her to miss. I woke up when Dad got home. He wasn’t feeling well either, but wasn’t alarmed because Mom often worked late on proposals. He sat with me and rubbed my back; I slept a lot. When he hadn’t heard from her he started to get worried. Called her boss, kept texting her phone. He went to look for her at an empty lot they own off Cliffside, because sometimes she went there to think, for the quiet. He came home and said she wasn’t there, but her car was, and it scared me so bad. I was so sick, but I went back with him to look for her. Like maybe she was mad at him and was hiding in the woods, I remember thinking that. It was all sideways, like a dream. I was still so feverish Dad took me home and called the police and finally got the chief to listen to him, that something was wrong.” She steadied her voice, but Jake had to lean forward to hear her words. “No sign of blood or struggle at the scene. We would have seen it. The area’s wooded, with cliffs, and it was searched, thoroughly. The houses nearby, either no one was at home or no one heard anything suspicious. Major news coverage. Still no sign of her. Of course they suspected my dad.”

  She stopped and drank the margarita. “How about the day Bethany left you?”

  “Bethany had been stressed out by the accusation at work, and she was drinking a lot more than she ever had before. Sometimes I’d come home late, and she wouldn’t be there. She’d get back an hour later, drunk, having gone out clubbing with friends. Sometimes she’d take a rideshare home, and she could barely stand.”

  “She told Julie she thought someone had drugged her at least once.”

  “The fight at the bar. Yes. Lizbeth said there was a guy who might have slipped something into her drink. Lizbeth said she’d take better care of her, watch over her more. I thought this partying would all stop once I’d taken the company public. The pressure of launch would be off me, and I could take a step back. Then we could both catch our breath. And I thought she was numbing herself to the miscarriage.

  “That morning she told me when I got back from my run that she was leaving me.” He took a deep breath. “She didn’t say the word divorce, just that we needed a break. I was stunned. I don’t know how to describe it. It was like I’d just woken up from a long sleep and the world had changed. I had done all this for her, this company, to give her a great life, and she didn’t want it. It was an awful, horrible realization that I’d done everything wrong. And how do you fix it when she’s packed a bag and she’s made up her mind? I didn’t even know what to say. Usually I have a plan. A strategy. I had nothing.”

  “You can’t live life according to a strategy.”

  “I know. She wouldn’t discuss it. Our marriage was over, but no discussion. I felt like an anvil had hit me from the sky. She asked me to leave, so she could finish packing. She said she’d call me in a few days to let me know where she was. I left. I shouldn’t have, but what was I going to do, stop her physically from leaving? Beg her to talk to me?” He shook his head. “I went to my office. I was like a robot. I tried to have a normal day. I literally couldn’t function. After an hour I left.”

  “And went home.”

  “Yes. But she was already gone. The house was empty. I noticed she had taken a bag she took when she flew. So…I have an app on my phone that tells me when there’s a credit card charge on my Visa, and I activated it. I thought, at least I’ll know where she’s going if she buys a ticket.”

  “Why wouldn’t she just take her car somewhere?”

  “Oh, because she said she was heading to the airport and she’d get a rideshare. She was leaving the car I’d bought her with me. But someone else must have taken her to the airport. There was no rideshare purchase on her credit card to the airport.”

  What if Mom took her? she thought. “Why fly to Houston? Why not drive? It’s only three hours.”

  “I assumed she was going to fly on to somewhere else. Maybe she hadn’t decided yet. Or take a shuttle from Hobby to Intercontinental.” That was the larger airport in Houston. “You can get to anywhere in the world from Intercontinental.”

  Jake continued:
“I couldn’t stay in the house. Couldn’t bear to be there with the memories of her. I have a place that belonged to my folks out in Marble Falls; I drove out there. In a daze. I honestly barely remember driving it. I got there. We always had food in the freezer, and a bunch of beers were left over from the last weekend we’d spent there. I opened up a beer and sat on the couch and I started drinking. I started making lists. Like what I could have done differently versus what I would do to win her back.” He shook his head. “Lists. My wife left me and I made lists. Pathetic.”

  “Did you want her back?”

  “Then? Of course,” he said.

  “Really? She had been accused of theft. That had to be embarrassing for you, maybe even bad for your prospects of launching the company.”

  “That never made it into the news. It was a non-event.” His voice grew tight.

  Had the threat of bad publicity given Andy some kind of control or leverage over both Bethany and Jake? “So you pounded beers.”

  “Yes. I got the alert that she’d charged a ticket to Houston on Southwest to the Visa card. I didn’t know why she was going there. I tried to call her. She wouldn’t answer. I left her voicemails. She never called back.”

  “Why Houston? Sharon seems clueless as to why she went there.”

  “Well, her friend Lizbeth was from there originally.”

  “She was?”

  “Yeah. I thought they might have gone together. Maybe for a long girls’ weekend, and all would be fine when she got back. But it was just the one ticket. And later when I talked to Lizbeth she said she hadn’t seen her that day. She has no reason to lie.”

  “Did she go straight to the airport?”

  He shook his head. “There were two hours between her leaving the bank and her showing up at the airport.”

  “You think she met someone?”

  My mom, Mariah thought. Could she have met Bethany before Bethany went to Houston? Why?

  “And so then, I got drunk at my grandparents’ place. I tried to call her. Nothing, just voicemail. I kept drinking. I made a frozen pizza. I texted my assistant that I was going to be out the rest of the week, no explanation. I watched TCM”—she fought the urge to smile; it was her favorite channel, too—“and I went to sleep. I woke up, I tried to call Sharon, thinking maybe she’s heard from Bethany or she knows why this has happened, there’s no answer. I drank some more, I slept through the night.” He cleared his throat. “The next day, I’m hungover as hell. Sharon called me back, tells me that she hasn’t heard from Bethany but that Bethany told her she was leaving me. I raged at Sharon for not telling me, which was crazy, because of course her loyalty is to her daughter. She accused me of being a terrible husband. She’d never turned on me before; we always got along. That was over, this was clearly my fault and it would be forever.”

  “Sharon needed an explanation,” Mariah said. “You’re her pattern. You’re her reason. So she hadn’t heard from her?”

  “She said she hadn’t.” Jake ran the back of his hand along his bottom lip, as though wiping his chin clean. “We weren’t really, you know, worried yet.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I didn’t want to see anyone. Explain to anyone that she’d left me. My phone was filling with messages from my investors, from my exec team, and I was deleting them all unheard. I couldn’t even care. I went swimming in the lake, which was freezing. I watched stuff on Netflix. I drank beer. I waited for her to call me. After another day, and no word, I called Sharon again. Sharon said she hadn’t heard a word from her. She was starting to panic.”

  “So did you call her friends?”

  “I called Julie and Andy. Just begging them to tell me if they’d heard from her, if she was all right. Oh, Andy loved that. He loved me having to beg.” A sour edge now in his voice. “Andy had the nerve to say to me, ‘She stole money from me, and now she’s gone.’ And Julie…” He stopped, shook his head.

  “What?”

  His gaze met hers. “She told me that she thought Bethany had lost her mind. She kept saying what a great guy I was, Beth didn’t deserve me, blah blah, did I need anything, did I want to have dinner so we could talk, all kind of weirdly coy, and I thought, what the hell, are you hitting on me two days after my wife’s deserted me?” He shook his head; his face was pale. “I decided I had to be misreading her.”

  “What about Lizbeth?”

  “I only met her twice. I thought she was kind of cool but weird. One time she had a blue wig, the other time white. Like white as snow. But…she was there for Bethany when I wasn’t.” Bitterness in his voice.

  “And then Lizbeth dropped out of your life.”

  “She was never in mine. She was in Bethany’s.”

  “And you didn’t talk to my mother.”

  “I frankly didn’t know your mother existed.”

  “And then the police started looking for your wife…”

  “Well, after three days, really, maybe she’s not going to call me, but when there was no contact with her mom, Sharon and I got frantic. Then they reviewed the security cameras. The cameras lost track of her in the airport. No camera caught her in a parking garage or at a car rental counter. The trail ran cold in Houston.”

  “So, someone picked her up. Or she changed her appearance.”

  “Why would she even care about the security cameras…” he started and then stopped. “You think she planned on vanishing into thin air.”

  “She might worry you would be looking for her.”

  “Sometimes I wondered if she really did take the money at Ahoy. And ran.”

  “You still wear your wedding ring,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “But you wouldn’t take her back.”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure she no longer wants me, so that’s a moot point. I don’t want her. Not after what she did to me, her mother.” He was taking up for Sharon, when Sharon always attacked him.

  “That woman at the bar that met you on trivia night. Are you dating her?”

  He glanced down at his plate, then back at her. “No. She’s a friend. She might want to be more than that but…people don’t understand what you’ve gone through. I can’t just snap my fingers and be over what happened and ready to date. It’s not like a normal breakup.”

  Mariah felt an odd sense of relief. She pushed the feeling away.

  “So,” Jake said. “What do we do?”

  “We dig. We find what happened to them.”

  “Show the police that email.”

  “They’re fixated on my dad. He and the Lakehaven chief have an unpleasant past. I need more proof.”

  He ate his last forkful of food, and verde sauce spilled on his shirt. “Excuse me,” he said, and headed toward the restroom, dabbing at the stain.

  Mariah pulled out the phone and the stolen page, and she dialed the unknown number from the address book.

  Two rings, then an answer. A woman’s voice. “Hello?”

  “Hello?”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “My name is Mariah Dunning. I’d like to know who this is.”

  “I don’t know you. I’m not giving you my name.”

  “Please. I’m trying to find out how you are connected to Bethany Curtis. Your number was in her address book. What’s your name?”

  More ticks of silence. “Penny.”

  The name of the girl in the old photo. “Penny,” Mariah repeated.

  “Bethany called me once, but I don’t really know her.”

  “Why did she call you?”

  “Our families knew each other when I was a kid. She was writing something about her childhood. About her father. But I don’t really remember them as family friends. And my parents have passed, so I really couldn’t help her.”

  “This is a Houston number.”

  Another pause. “Oh, yes, I work and live in Houston.”

  “Is that where your families knew each other?”

  “Yes,” she said after a moment.


  Sharon had lied to her. But Julie said she thought the Blevins family hailed from Chicago.

  “I’m sorry, I couldn’t help her, and I don’t think I can really help you,” Penny said.

  Mariah didn’t want her to hang up. “Her father killed himself.”

  “So she said. Like I said, though, I didn’t remember much about them.”

  “Holy I. That was written on your picture I found.”

  “Oh. Well, Holy I was our school. Holy Innocents. But I only went to preschool with Bethany. They moved.” Four beats of silence. “Where did you say this picture was?”

  “Inside a book in Mrs. Blevins’s house.”

  “How funny. I guess Mrs. Blevins is one for keeping old photos.”

  “It was a newspaper photo. You were maybe four. Why were you in the newspaper?”

  More silence. “I won an art contest at the preschool. I think my picture was in the school paper. Back when they had school papers. I can’t help you. Please don’t call me again.”

  “Do you know where Bethany is? Did she come to Houston to see you?”

  “No and no.” She paused. “Look, she said she’s writing a story or a novel or something that touched on suicide’s effect on families. I think she was calling people from her father’s past just to see what they could tell her. But I barely remember her dad, and like I said, my parents are gone. They could have helped her, but I couldn’t. I’m sorry, I’ve got to go. Goodbye.” Penny hung up.

  On her phone Mariah searched for “Houston Holy Innocents.” She clicked through. It was an Episcopal church and school in west Houston, close to the suburb of Katy. She went to its website. Nothing unusual. A big church.

  She didn’t know Penny’s last name. She searched for “Hal Blevins Houston.” She got a few hits, but nothing that seemed to match the situation—these were all men who were much older, weren’t connected to Sharon or Bethany.

  Jake came back to the table and she closed her phone.

  “Hey, um, are Sharon and Bethany originally from Austin?”

  “They’ve been here since Bethany was little. Before that they lived in Chicago.”

  “I found out they lived in Houston, too, when Bethany was little.”