by Jeff Abbott
“And you want me to pay you for information.” The crazies had come out.
“Just a small fee. In exchange for some evidence that would point to Bethany’s killer.”
“She’s dead?”
It was as if she didn’t hear the question. “And then you could take the evidence to the police. You yourself, brought to you as a result of your blog…and your TV show, American Unsolved. You could say it was anonymously brought to you. You go to the cops, you’re a hero. And a TV star. What a start it would be for you.”
He licked his lips. This was a risk, but it might seal the deal for the show. He did not think to wonder how this woman knew this news he hadn’t shared yet on the blog. “I’m about to leave for LA,” he said. “My flight’s in three hours.”
“So responsible, getting to the airport early. Meet me at this address on highway 71.” She gave it to him, he wrote it down. “It’s on the way to the airport, so you won’t be late.”
“How will I know you?”
“I’ll know you, Reveal,” she said, and she hung up.
47
MARIAH HAD STOPPED by the Starbucks to gather her courage to do what she must, and thought she’d sit in one of the big chairs to drink her pre-felony vanilla latte. She had only taken two sips when Dennis Broussard sat down across from her. He had a backpack on his shoulder, with a Lakehaven Police Department patch on it.
“Hey, Mariah,” he said. “I saw you come in. May I join you?”
“This really is the doughnut shop of the twenty-first century.” She kept her voice steady. Here she was considering breaking into a house, and a police chief wanted to talk to her. Maybe the universe was sending her a message.
“I thought we could talk. Informally.”
“You can’t really have an interrogation in Starbucks,” she said.
“How are you?” he said.
She knew what this meant. Not how was work or how was her dating life but how was she coping with the loss that never left her? Oh, and I’m thinking of breaking and entering into a dangerous guy’s house and sitting here trying to work up my courage to commit a felony. I’m great.
She answered, “I’m feeling so tired. My mom is still missing, and someone tried to hurt my dad. How are you?”
He seemed surprised by the question. “I’m angry about those same problems you have.”
“I mean, here’s the big case you could never crack, no matter how hard you looked at my dad. Doesn’t that keep you up at night? That the one case you don’t solve is the girl you wanted to date in high school?”
“I want you to know something.” He took both her hands in his. “The first time I met your mother, it was the first day of school. Freshman year. I had just moved here. And you know what Lakehaven High School is like. So many kids here start in kindergarten, and so they’re already old friends. It’s a hard school to be a new kid.”
She nodded. “I know.”
“Now they do all these extra things to make a new kid feel welcome. Bend over backwards. Back in my day you were on your own.” He took a long breath. “I tried to be funny, you know, the first day, tried to crack a joke with the most popular guy in class, and it was a mistake. A big one. He turned on me, decided I was going to be the butt of every joke because I’d presumed too much, crossed that social line. At the end of the first day I begged my parents to move us back to Baton Rouge. My dad told me to be a man, and my mom offered to call the boy’s mother, and that would have made it all worse. The second day I walked toward that school like it was a prison. I think I’d slept an hour at most that whole night. I could see the guy who tormented me all that first day waiting for me by the flagpole. You feel like your life is over.” He stopped for a moment, looked at the floor, then met Mariah’s gaze again. “And suddenly, walking next to me is the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. The best smile. The kindest look. And she put an arm around me and said, ‘You’re Denny, right?’—I went by Denny then—and I could barely nod, thinking maybe she was going to tear me up, too, maybe humiliate me some way. Maybe she’s the girlfriend of the mean kid.”
“She wasn’t,” Mariah said.
“No, she wasn’t,” he said, with the first smile he’d ever offered her. “She said, ‘My name’s Beth, and I’m sorry you had a bad day yesterday. Today will be different.’ And I said, ‘No it won’t,’ and she said, ‘Yes it will,’ and she went up to that kid—his name was Wade—and she said something to him I couldn’t hear. Then she took my arm and smiled at everyone who’d gathered to see me beat up, and we walked into the school together. Wade didn’t ever really bother me again. She told people that I was her cousin who had just moved here—why she did that I don’t know—and she hadn’t had a chance yesterday to introduce me around. We had four classes together, and she made sure we sat together in all of them. She’d noticed I was struggling that first day, she’d heard what happened to me, and she decided to help me.”
“She could have just said you were a friend.”
“I think she knew the blood claim gave me more protection,” he said. “It took until end of freshman year for people to realize it wasn’t true, but by then I was okay. I had friends. I’d found my place.” He looked at Mariah. “She gave me a gift I could never repay. No one’s ever been kinder to me in my time of need. Do you see why I can’t let it go?” He cleared his throat. “She helped me when I needed help. She needs justice.”
Maybe she did the same for Bethany. Mom, always trying to fix the trouble for someone else. “I’m glad she made it so you didn’t sit alone in the cafeteria at lunch, but that doesn’t mean my dad killed her.”
“She liked your dad. Craig was impossibly good-looking. Football star and smart. It was so annoying. They were that perfect high school couple. I was just the guy with the wrong kind of face and the right kind of heart.” His voice wavered. Then he pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes for a moment.
“But still. She wasn’t a case file. My dad wasn’t just a suspect.”
“Mariah, has it ever occurred to you that I am concerned for you and your father?”
“No, it really hasn’t.” She took a sip from her latte. “You’ve suggested to me, to my face, that my father is a killer and that I’m lying to protect him.”
“I am concerned for you,” Broussard said. “For what you’re doing.”
“You’ve always wanted to trap my dad,” she said. She was trying not to shake, thinking of what Dad had said, of her shoving him into the wall after he destroyed her investigation board. Not give away her doubts.
He shook his head. “If your dad killed your mom, I know it had to have been an accident. I don’t think he ever would have willingly hurt her. And maybe he panicked and covered it up.”
She took another sip of her latte. “And I helped him?”
“Through silence. I know you love him very much.”
“And now someone wants him dead,” she said. “Doesn’t that point to another culprit?”
“It might. It might be a vigilante who wants your father to face justice.”
“Justice isn’t a rock dropped from a bridge.”
“I know. Did you see what happened with your mom?”
“What?” His sudden question felt like a punch.
“Your very muddled memory from that day…if you’d just been in bed, you wouldn’t have a memory problem. You slept, you ate, you slept some more. That you don’t remember suggests to me you saw something you’d rather forget.”
“I didn’t know you were a neurologist,” she said, not looking at him.
“It’s so unfair,” he said. “You are forced to choose. You can’t help your mom, but you can help your dad. The pressure to stay silent. To not remember what really happened.”
She thought of the stray images that crept into her mind: Mom, her hands up, a voice yelling “We are not doing this!,” the breeze on her face, a pain in her knees. “That DVD you found in my car.”
“Yes?”
/> “What’s on it? Will you tell me?”
“It’s password protected. We haven’t broken the password yet.”
“If I can guess the password, will you let me watch it with you?”
He said nothing for a moment. Thinking. “It could be evidence. I think not.”
“You were her friend. You helped her before. Let me see it, and I’ll help you.”
He studied her for a moment, then he pulled a laptop out of his backpack. He then pulled an evidence bag with a DVD inside it. “I was about to head down and see if a guy at the APD forensics lab could tell me how to break the password.”
“Put it into your laptop,” she said.
He stared at her. Weighing. He did. He clicked on the DVD’s icon and a password prompt appeared. He put his fingers on the keyboard. Waiting.
“Penny,” she said.
“As in penny for your thoughts?”
“Capitalize the P, like the girl’s name.”
He turned the screen so she could see it. He typed it. “Nope. Why Penny?”
She thought of the password on the sticky note on the old computer in Bethany’s old room. The one Sharon couldn’t bear to throw away, written in her daughter’s handwriting.
“Try spiker44.”
He typed.
A video started. Mariah felt her breath lock into her chest.
Darkness, then focus. Grainy with age—this hadn’t been shot digitally, but transferred to disc later, Mariah realized.
A bedroom. A child’s room: dolls on an unmade bed, a soccer ball, a child, maybe four. Mariah recognized Penny from the picture. Half her face was obscured by a bright pink feather boa. Playing dress-up, Mariah thought.
“Beth, we are going to be models,” Penny announced, her words muffled slightly by the boa.
“You are,” another girl’s voice said.
“Yes, me first. Ask me questions like the lady on TV.” Penny threw the boa over her shoulder dramatically.
“I don’t want to play this,” the other girl—Beth—said off-camera. “I want to go home.”
“When they’re done talking,” Penny said. She whirled dramatically. “Hello, everyone, I’m so glad you’re here to see my movie. I am the star.”
“What is the name of your movie?” Beth asked.
“Princess Penny,” Penny said.
A noise in the distance. The camera moved slightly in response, but Penny inserted herself in front of it, annoyed. “Hello, I’m the star.”
“Yes,” Beth said. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Many,” Penny said. “They all love me.” She started singing a song about love, making the words up as she whirled.
“Don’t wake up the baby,” Beth warned. “Can I set the camera down and be in the movie, too?”
“The baby won’t wake up,” Penny said. “And you need a costume and a boa, and I only have the one.”
“Penny…”
“I need a runway like on TV,” Penny said. “We can use the sidewalk. Or the street.”
Mariah tensed. Oh no, no, no.
“I’m not supposed to go outside alone,” the voice said.
“Not alone.” Penny turned and walked out of the room. Beth, with the camera followed.
“What is this?” Broussard said. “Who are these girls?”
Penny went out the front door. In the background a baby began to cry. The camera didn’t follow Penny outside.
“She’s crying,” the voice of Beth said. Penny didn’t answer.
The camera—held by Bethany, Mariah thought—stopped, panned back. The sound of the slamming front door. The video showed the camera moving back through a hall, toward the hallway. Then through a door, where a crying infant lay in a crib.
“It’s all right, baby,” Beth’s voice soothed. “It’s all right.” Her hand, touching the baby’s head, trying to quiet it.
Then outside, a horrible thudding noise, the scream of brakes. A sound of nothing but wrongness. Then an engine, roaring, racing, gone.
The camera fixed on the baby, who had stopped crying, looking into the lens. Feet thundered on the stairs.
The camera moved back toward the front door.
“Penny! Penny!” A woman’s voice screaming, then howling, horrifying, a grief that sliced the air.
Then the camera appeared to be carefully set down on a table. She left it running. It showed empty hallway, part of a den. Fifteen seconds. No words from Beth, and she wasn’t in the shot. Then the sound of footsteps walking toward it. A man’s voice. “Honey, what’s happening?”
The last words heard on it were Beth’s: “I’m sorry.”
Then the man and the child, walking away into the camera’s view again, the girl glancing back at it, only the back of the man visible, hurrying toward the screams outside, the two of them moving out of range of the camera’s lens and gone.
The video ended.
Mariah was trembling.
“What is this? Who are these people? Did your mom film this?” Broussard asked.
“When she was four? No. But it is proof that my father didn’t kill my mother.”
“Mariah, tell me what this means?”
“I can’t tell you yet. I don’t have all the proof. But this is why she vanished.”
“Now you’re saying this video clears your father? How? Why does your mom have this? What is the screaming? Did something happen to that first girl? Was that the sound of a car hitting her?”
She wrenched her hands free of Broussard’s grip. The rage that so often spiked in her heart nearly overwhelmed her; she wanted to hit him. Instead she fled the table, conscious of his stare upon her.
“Mariah!” he yelled. She ran to her car and got in.
Bethany had given Mariah’s mother that video. Had Mom known the password or watched it? Or just kept it for safekeeping and it had ended up in Mariah’s car? Had Mom hidden it there in case her own car was searched? Had someone come looking for it and hurt her mother to get it? In her car she tried Penny’s number again. No answer. She had to take this fight to Andy.
Mariah wheeled out of the lot. She thought about what the video meant, and that she was close to the truth now. A terrible truth.
48
ANDY AND JULIE lived in a nicer neighborhood on the west side of town, off 2222, a road that curved and snaked through the rising hills. Mariah drove there, wondering how far she would go to find what she needed. The video—it tied her mother’s fate even more tightly to what had happened to Bethany Curtis.
Andy knew about Hal’s suicide. Andy was leveraging this knowledge to victimize Sharon. He was at the heart of this, somehow, and she had to know how.
Mariah parked down the street from Andy and Julie’s house, opened the trunk. She had a set of lockpicks, and she stuck them in her pocket. A telescoping baton was already in her boot. She left behind a Taser and a pistol in the trunk. She had felt so tough buying the objects, filled with such purpose, watching the training videos (which now seemed ridiculously inadequate), and now she felt like a child caught at a game she shouldn’t be playing.
Because now it mattered. It wasn’t a game. And she didn’t know what she was doing.
She shut the trunk and walked up to the door.
She tried the doorbell. No answer.
She went around to the back. The yard needed mowing, but the flower beds were neat and had been recently mulched. There was a swing set and a squadron of Star Wars action figures scattered across the yard. A paperback, open facedown on a chair. That froze her for a moment, because maybe Julie was at home and had just been outside reading and hadn’t heard her knock. She went and knocked on the back door, boldly, a lie for Julie ready on her lips. But there was no answer. The book had just been forgotten in an earlier moment.
She studied the lock. She had her lock picks. But she started checking under the numerous potted plants, and she found a key under the fifth pot she searched. She slid it into the back door, turned it, and opened the door.
No sound of an alarm, but it could be silent. She walked quickly through the house, looking for an alarm pad. There wasn’t one, and she was relieved to see that Julie and her kid weren’t lying down for a nap. The house was empty.
There was a corner desk in the kitchen, a little nook with built-in drawers and a computer. She touched the keyboard and the computer awoke. It hadn’t signed out the last user: Julie.
She scanned through her emails. There weren’t many. Appointment requests from the gym for personal training, correspondence with clients, emails from the preschool her son attended.
Nothing from Sharon, nothing of interest. She checked the list of users. Andy didn’t have an account on this machine.
She went to the browser. Her recent history was all higher-end shopping sites: furniture, clothing, shoes.
And a Google search on Mariah. Julie had visited several news accounts about Mom’s disappearance. And a Faceplace page on Bethany. Mariah clicked on that, and it jumped to the main Faceplace login page, with Julie’s email and password prefilled out—an option one could set so not to have to log in every time you visited the page.
She opened the FIND BETHANY page.
There were all the same postings Mariah had found before when she’d glanced at the page after reading Reveal’s article. Nothing new. But as the page’s administrator, there were postings and messages sent privately to Julie. Mostly from people who had gone to school with them, asking if there were any new leads, asking how Sharon was doing. Kind notes.
Then she saw the name on one of them: Penny Gladney. The profile picture was the same as the one she’d seen in Hal’s book. The one from a newspaper.
The note, sent to Julie, said: I want her to suffer some more.
Nothing else. The note was dated a month ago. Julie had made no answer to it.
She clicked on the profile. Penny Gladney had just one Faceplace friend: Julie Santos. Penny had posted no statuses, no updates, liked no other posts by other people on the site. There were no pictures or biographical data.
