by Shawna Seed
Years later, she could still vividly remember that library hallway – the faint smell of a lemon-scented cleaning product and the air-conditioned quiet as she listened to the words that would set her life on a different path.
It’s not safe for you here. It will never be safe.
Brian won’t cooperate because he’s protecting you. If he talks, your life is in danger. But if he doesn’t talk, he’ll go to prison. The only way to help him is to stay away so they can’t find you.
Suddenly everything made sense. Brian had wanted her to find the money so she could go away and he could do what he needed to do.
He’s willing to go to prison. He would make that sacrifice for you, to keep you safe.
But if no one could find her, then no one could hurt her, and Brian could cooperate with the police. It was his only chance at saving himself.
Will you stay away? Will you make that sacrifice for him?
She begged for one last chance to see Brian, to talk to him on the phone – anything. But it was too dangerous. Cliff and Missy were dead, and someone had tried to kill her.
It has to be this way. Don’t ever come back. Forget about Brian. Start a new life.
After the call, Sharlah locked herself in a bathroom stall at the library and cried for so long that someone told a librarian, who came to check on her.
She lied and told the librarian that her boyfriend had died.
It didn’t feel like a lie, though.
She stayed in bed the next day, turning the maid away at the door and not bothering to eat or shower.
The day after that, she got up early, put on her makeup and curled her hair. Then she walked up and down the commercial strip, putting in applications at every restaurant.
The first line of each application was the same.
NAME: Elizabeth Ellsworth.
At the airport in San Diego, Elizabeth was sorely tempted to rent a car. She’d glimpsed the ocean as the plane descended, and she’d been seized by a desire to drive up the coast with the window rolled down, the breeze in her hair. She’d never seen the Pacific before and probably never would again. She had a whole afternoon to kill before the conference’s opening reception that evening.
Elizabeth reminded herself of the reasons a car was a bad idea. She’d have to use her credit card – that was one. She’d end up in another database – that was two. Weighed against the risks, the pleasure of driving the coast wasn’t worth it.
She marched past the rental counters and out to the curb to find the hotel shuttle. San Diego probably had a perfectly adequate bus system if she wanted to see the ocean.
Still, she couldn’t help sighing a little as she climbed into the dingy shuttle van.
Elizabeth’s life had been full of these calculations, something she hadn’t anticipated the day she cut up Sharlah Webb’s driver’s license.
Those first few weeks as Elizabeth Ellsworth went by in a blur. She talked her way into a job waiting tables – even though she couldn’t list references – and found a furnished studio apartment. She got a Kansas driver’s license and paid $1,200 cash for a used car.
Whenever her courage started to falter – and it did, often – she reminded herself that this was what Brian wanted for her. She’d started over from scratch when she left her hometown, too. She could do this.
The money was both a gift and a burden. It gave her security she’d never had, but she worried constantly that she’d get caught with it. Even after she paid for a car and rented an apartment, she still had nearly $17,000.
Eventually, she hit on a plan she thought was perfect. She paid as many as bills as she could with cash, which helped whittle down the stacks of twenties. She also added extra money to her tips every week and deposited it all in the bank. She wanted to declare as much of the money as income as she could and pay taxes on it.
This was her life: She worked as many shifts as she could get, and she went back to her tiny apartment and read. No matter how many shifts she worked, though, or how many books she read, she missed Brian.
She couldn’t imagine a whole life of nothing but waiting tables and reading and missing Brian, but she couldn’t imagine anything else, either.
One day she noticed a stack of brochures in the library lobby for a GED program. Impulsively, she took one.
Cold weather moved in, colder than anything she’d ever experienced. The holidays almost crushed her. On her 20th birthday – her real birthday, not her new one – she got in her car, determined to drive to Texas, danger to herself or to Brian be damned. She got as far as Wichita before she turned around.
A month later, she signed up to get her GED.
She had forgotten how much she loved school when she was a kid, back before her brother killed a boy from a well-liked, churchgoing family and her last name became an unbearable burden in her hometown.
Her GED teacher, impressed by how well she’d done, encouraged her to try community college. “One class,” he said. “Just try.”
She took freshman English and aced it.
Brian always told her she was smart enough for college, but she’d never quite believed him. Now she did. Emboldened by her success, she took three classes the next semester and set her sights on transferring to a four-year school.
At 21, she moved 40 miles down the road to Lawrence and enrolled in the university as an English major.
Her adviser, concerned about a 21-year-old freshman, encouraged her to give up waiting tables. He thought an on-campus job would ease her transition.
Elizabeth found a part-time job in the library, a beautiful old building right in the center of campus. She spent hours there, even when she wasn’t working, studying in front of the big windows that overlooked the football stadium and the valley beyond.
She tried dating, but Brian was never far from her thoughts.
Sometimes she wondered whether it was really necessary for her to stay away from him forever. If Brian testified against the people who were threatening her and helped put them in prison, how could they hurt her?
She began to think about getting in touch with him, maybe after she’d graduated. Part of her motivation was selfish – she knew that. She wanted Brian’s parents to see how wrong they’d been about her. She also desperately wanted someone to be proud of her, and she thought no one would be prouder than Brian.
Elizabeth discovered that the library had back copies of one of the Houston papers on microfilm, and she spent one rainy weekend going through the archives, searching for news of a big drug trial. Every time she saw a headline that looked promising, she’d stop the machine and read the article all the way through to the end.
While she was scanning for Brian’s name, she got an education about drug cases.
When she first read the term “money laundering,” Elizabeth envisioned cash swirling round and round in a washing machine. She knew that the police used drug-sniffing dogs, and she had the vague idea that dealers’ cash might be tainted by telltale scents.
Eventually, she realized that the term couldn’t be literal – no one was loading up a Kenmore with cash. Laughing at her own naïveté, her curiosity piqued, she went to the reference section and pulled the big legal dictionary off the shelf.
Money laundering, she discovered, involved taking the profits from illegal activities and passing them through legitimate channels, like bank accounts. That, of course, exactly described what Elizabeth had done with the $20,000.
The legal dictionary didn’t offer any clue what the punishment might be, so Elizabeth dashed across campus to the law library, her heart pounding.
There, she discovered she’d committed a federal offense punishable by 20 years in prison.
Elizabeth had always known the money was dirty. But she’d convinced herself that spending it was OK – because she didn’t know about the drugs, because she was putting herself through school, because she’d paid taxes.
She saw herself as an innocent victim who made the best of a bad situation
. But the law wouldn’t see it that way, and Elizabeth knew she had only one person to blame for that.
And just like that, she never wanted to see Brian again.
Elizabeth’s hotel room wasn’t ready, so she got some information from the clerk about San Diego’s bus and trolley system and left her bags at the bell desk, thinking she’d do a little sightseeing.
But she changed her plans when she spotted the hotel’s business center.
People indulge in all kinds of secret habits when traveling – drinking too much, committing adultery, ordering X-rated in-room movies.
Elizabeth had a different habit: searching the Internet for information about Brian.
Her anger toward him had softened over the years. The first step in the process was a messy love affair in grad school. She realized that she was doing exactly what Brian had done to her: deceiving someone she cared about not out of malice but because she couldn’t find the words to tell the truth. The lies just kept adding up until it became impossible to find a way back to the truth.
She ended the relationship and vowed never to fall in love again.
As the years went on, she thought more and more about Brian. She often wondered how his life had turned out, and sometimes she indulged her curiosity.
The Internet was a terrific tool for tracking people down, and Elizabeth was very adept at using it. But she also knew that Internet searches left tracks, and she hadn’t gotten away with being someone else for all this time by being sloppy.
To avoid leaving a trail, she only used computers where someone else was logged on. Elizabeth was always on the prowl for such opportunities, no matter how brief, and she wasn’t above telling a white lie or two to get them. Her one rule was that she never used a university computer – it seemed both too risky and ethically questionable.
Elizabeth always told herself that if she could get just one hit on Brian’s name, she’d quit. So far, in her haphazard searching, she hadn’t. She didn’t expect him to have a blog, but she was a little puzzled that he never popped up at all. Sometimes she wondered if he’d ended up in a witness protection program.
The hotel business center was empty except for one 50-something businessman tapping away, his suitcase and briefcase propped against the desk next to him.
He looked up when Elizabeth walked in, and she gave him her warmest smile. “Hello,” she said, allowing herself to sound a little more Southern than she usually did.
He returned her smile.
Elizabeth went to the computer opposite him. At the login prompt, she typed in a made-up room number and the name of one of her favorite college professors as a password. “Shoot!” she said under her breath.
She moved to the next computer and repeated the maneuver, then sighed in frustration. “Excuse me,” she said to the businessman. “Is the login they gave you working?”
“Yep,” he said. A printer against the wall whirred to life. “That’s my boarding pass printing right now.”
It was working out exactly as Elizabeth had hoped.
“I bet it’s because I’m not officially checked in yet,” she said. “They didn’t have my room ready.” She smiled at him. “I hate to ask, but if you’re leaving, could you stay signed on and let me use that computer? I just have to check my email.” She lowered her eyes, then looked up at the man again. “I promise not to visit any NSFW sites.”
The man laughed as he got up. “Be my guest,” he said, holding out the chair for her.
Elizabeth slid into the chair. “Thanks so much.”
She clicked around harmlessly for a bit just to make sure he wasn’t coming back. After 5 minutes of checking weather and headlines, she called up a search engine.
She always searched the same way. First she tried Brian’s full name – Brian Joseph Lowry. Next, she’d try Brian Lowry and Houston.
Nothing useful came up when she tried Brian’s full name, so she moved on.
When she typed in “Brian Lowry” and “Houston,” a link popped up. It appeared to be a headline from the Houston paper.
SLAIN WOMAN’S MOM LOOKS TO DNA FOR CLOSURE
Elizabeth clinked on the link and got a “file not found” error.
A story about a dead woman that hit with Brian’s name had to be about Missy. Elizabeth called up the search engine again and typed in “Missy Burke” and “Houston.”
The first link was the same newspaper headline she’d just seen, and clicking on it produced the same error message.
The second link was intriguing. The top line said “Missy Burke” and under that was a squib of text: finds Missy Burke dead in her apartment
Elizabeth clicked on the link and waited for the page to load. The first thing that appeared on her screen was a bold headline:
WHAT HAPPENED TO SHARLAH WEBB?
Gasping, Elizabeth glanced over her shoulder, but no one in the lobby was watching.
She scrolled down to read the text.
Sharlah Marie Webb disappeared when she was 19-years-old, after her boyfriend Brian Lowry was arrested in a drug case and two of their friends were murdered. The night before she disappeared, Sharlah was shot in the arm.
The day she disappeared, she was wearing a pink tee shirt, blue jeans and sneakers. She carried a blue suitcase and a brown purse. The last known person to talk to her was a neighbor who helped her load her suitcase in her car around 2 p.m. Her car was abandoned in a parking lot near the Galveston Causeway.
Sharlah is 5 foot 3 and weighs 110 pounds. She has blonde hair and blue eyes and may have a scar on her right upper arm.
Instinctively, Elizabeth’s hand flew to her right bicep.
Below the bloc of text was a photo that caused Elizabeth to gasp again.
She remembered that red dress from first grade.
After the photo came a timeline listing the events of that week – Brian’s arrest, Cliff’s murder, Missy’s murder, Sharlah’s disappearance.
At the bottom was one last line:
If you have information about Sharlah, click here.
Elizabeth’s first impulse was to shut down the computer, collect her luggage from the bell desk and flee, but she forced herself to remain in her chair, to think.
She whirled her chair around and grabbed a blank piece of paper from the printer against the wall. Back in front of the computer monitor, she took a pen from her purse.
Who?
Elizabeth tapped her pen under the word she’d written, thinking. Halfway down the sheet, she wrote another word.
Why?
Elizabeth scrolled up and down the website again, looking for clues.
The site was basic – just text in a box, really. The URL gave it away as a site built from a simple online template and hosted by a discount company.
At the bottom of the page, Elizabeth hesitated and then hit the “click here” link, curious to see where it led.
The businessman had left himself signed in to his email account – lucky for Elizabeth, but he really should have been more careful. An empty email prompt came up with the “to” field filled in as findsharlah. The service provider offered no clue; it was one of the free web-based email services.
Elizabeth closed the email program and went back to the website.
Who?
Who might want to know where Sharlah Webb was? Elizabeth wrote down the first two answers that came to mind – the police, someone from the drug ring. Who else? Brian? Elizabeth wrote down his name, put a question mark behind it.
A gray-haired woman dressed like a tourist – stretch jeans, T-shirt with whales on it, tennis shoes – paused in the doorway of the business center. Elizabeth quickly clicked on another icon to bring something up in front of the website.
“Can anybody use these computers?”
“Hotel guests. You can get the password at the main desk,” Elizabeth said, trying to sound brisk and businesslike.
“Oh, OK,” the woman said, turning away. Elizabeth watched as she meandered across the lobby.
She grabbed the paper off the printer and moved to the corner of the room, where she could sit facing the lobby.
Police. Drug dealers. Brian?
Elizabeth went to her second question. Why?
The police – that was obvious. She was a money launderer and an identity thief. But wouldn’t the police department have put its phone number on the website?
Elizabeth couldn’t fathom why drug dealers would be looking for her, not after all this time. Twenty years was a long time to wait for revenge.
Brian? Brian might be curious about her life, just as she was about his. But Brian knew perfectly well what happened to her. She left town because he told her to, with the money and the false papers that he directed her to, and she stayed away because…
Something about the website had been nagging at her, and suddenly Elizabeth realized what it was. She read the text again.
The last known person to talk to her was a neighbor who helped her load her suitcase in her car around 2 p.m.
That wasn’t true, and Brian knew it.
Elizabeth drew a line through Brian’s name. It had been a little foolish to consider him, she realized. A man who could barely read creating a website? Not likely. And where would Brian have found her first-grade photo?
For that matter, where would drug dealers have found her first-grade photo?
She drew a line through drug dealers on her list.
That left the police, unless she could come up with someone else who would care what happened to her. Not her father and certainly not her brother Wayne. Her brother Rod? He’d given her his car when he shipped out to basic training, but he’d never written, and the last thing he said before he left was, “You’re on your own.”
Rod?
She wrote his name underneath where she’d scratched out Brian’s.
Elizabeth read over the text yet another time, straining for ideas.
It didn’t read to her like something a police officer would have produced. She thought back to the time she’d spent in the police station, answering questions about Missy.
