Eric glanced at Casey, then stepped forward. “Yes, you and I talked on the phone yesterday. I’m Eric VanDiepenbos. This is Casey Maldonado.”
The woman’s face went blank for just a second, until recognition hit. “About Lizzie? But…weren’t you in Colorado?”
“Yes, we flew in late last night.”
“You didn’t email me the photo you promised.”
“Sorry, we headed out as soon as we could get plane tickets. We thought we should come and see what we could find out.”
“But what if it’s not even Lizzie? You made the trip for nothing.”
“We didn’t.” Casey found her voice. “You look just like her.”
Betsy Lackey paled and sat down on a high stool behind the counter. Her mouthed worked, and she pressed her hand against it.
“I’m sorry,” Casey said. “Here she is.” She pulled out the picture of Alicia, and Ricky and laid it on the counter.
Betsy’s eyes filled. “Oh, God. Even after all these years.” She touched the photo gently. “She looks the same. She looks…like me.” Tears dribbled down her cheeks. Eric found a tissue carton on the counter and handed her a Kleenex. She held it scrunched in her hand as she stared dumbly at the picture.
“Betsy?” An older woman appeared in one of the aisles, and walked toward the counter.
Betsy slid the photo into her lap and turned it over.
The woman looked from Eric and Casey to Betsy. “Is everything all right?”
“I…” Betsy shook her head. “May I have a few minutes?”
“Of course. Do you need me to do anything? Are these people bothering you?” She looked suddenly afraid. “It’s not Billy, is it?”
“No, no, Billy’s fine.” Betsy managed a wobbly smile. “It’s something else. Can I talk with them somewhere?”
“Use the lunch room.”
Betsy nodded and came out from behind the counter. Eric followed. Casey felt the woman’s eyes on her, and hesitated. “I’m sorry to disturb her.”
The woman’s concern seemed genuine, her eyes reflecting only care for Betsy, plus maybe a little anger that Casey had caused her pain. “Is there something I can do?”
“I’m sure she’ll let you know.” Casey followed the others to the back of the store, into a cheerful room with a table, refrigerator, and sink. Betsy was already sitting, and she looked up as Casey closed the door. Finally, she wiped her face, and sat straight.
“Tell me, please.”
Eric looked at Casey, and she sighed. It really was her story to tell, more than his. Casey sat down across the table and explained that her brother had been Alicia’s boyfriend, and that’s how she’d gotten involved. She recounted what she knew about Alicia’s death—downplaying the torture and rape—and everything she and Eric had found out about her life, including the fact that Ricky was in jail for her murder even though nobody in her personal life believed he could be responsible. She left out the part that that circle of people could be counted on one hand.
Betsy listened with obvious confusion. “She was using the name Alicia McManus? Why?”
“Weren’t the cops looking for her in connection with her father’s death?”
“Not for years, and never really seriously. She was a kid, not a killer. A sweet kid, too. Funny, smart. She always got good grades, even though—” She made a face.
“I was wondering about that,” Casey said. “How you could be so close to her, and yet she and her dad lived in a car.”
Betsy’s eyes flicked up to Casey’s. “Listen, we offered lots of times. Told Uncle Cyrus we had plenty of room—he was my dad’s brother, you know. He knew they were welcome in our house. My dad used to say at least Uncle Cyrus should let Lizzie stay, even if he didn’t want to. I think he would have let her, but Lizzie didn’t want to leave him.”
“Why wouldn’t he just move in?”
“Pride, I guess. Didn’t want to take charity. Not even from his own brother. My dad about went crazy trying to convince him. After he got…after he died, my dad couldn’t forgive himself for not insisting. We kept telling him he’d tried. He’d done everything he could. Uncle Cyrus was just stubborn. Flat out refused to let us help him. Wouldn’t even park on our property. Had to find other places to stay where he thought it wasn’t because someone felt obligated. They ended up with a sort of permanent spot at the park.”
“And you couldn’t convince Elizabeth to stay with you?”
“Like I said, she didn’t want to. Felt her place was with her dad, even if it was in that dumpy old station wagon. He tried to convince her, too. Even moved her stuff into our house, but she moved right back out again.”
Eric pulled the photo of the man out of his folder. “Is this your uncle Cyrus?”
Betsy’s eyes filled again, and she took the photo. “That’s him. And the stupid car. Lizzie took this with my camera. She had it because she was supposed to take a picture of him for some job prospect. I guess she was just messing around.” Her voice had gone quiet, and she took a shuddering breath before looking up, steel having replaced the tears in her eyes. “How can I help?”
“If you could just tell us whatever you can remember. Was Cyrus mixed up with bad people? Were there any rumors after his death? Had Alic—Elizabeth ever said anything about being afraid of anyone? ”
“Like who?”
“Men, I guess.”
Betsy shook her head. “Can’t think of anything like that. But as far as after his death…” She chewed on her lips, deep in thought, then stood abruptly. “I’ll be right back.”
She left, and Eric took a seat at the table. “Well, what do you think?”
“She’s the best lead we’ve got. Maybe she can tell us something useful, even if she doesn’t know it is.”
Betsy came back. “I got the afternoon off. We’ll go to my house and I’ll show you some things.”
They walked with her several blocks to the pleasant two-story house Casey had seen on her run. Flowers bloomed in beds around the foundation and at the end of the walk, as well as in hanging baskets on the porch. A bicycle leaned against the house, and a well-used basketball hoop was attached to the garage. A porch swing hung beside the front door, a perfect place for looking out over the pretty neighborhood and tidy lawns. Oaks and elms spotted the yards, now in riotous red and orange, and Casey couldn’t help but notice that even with the warm weather, it still looked like autumn.
“Come on in.” Betsy led them into a large living room, with a huge flat-screen TV on the wall, and multiple wires and game controllers snaking across the floor. Shoes and sweatshirts and various plastic cups littered the floor and end tables, but rather than looking dirty, it made the house seem lived in. Casey wanted to sit on the puffy couch and curl up with a bag of chips.
“House with teens,” Betsy said. “No getting around this stuff anymore.”
“Looks familiar.” Eric grinned. “Wasn’t too long ago I was the one throwing stuff all over my folks’ place.” He blinked, then went quiet, probably thinking about the fact that his parents weren’t together anymore, and his father was actually in prison. Not too much opportunity to leave stuff lying around there.
“Have a seat here in the dining room,” Betsy said. “We’ll use the table. Do you mind waiting a minute? I’ll get the stuff from upstairs. I pulled it out of the attic after you called yesterday.”
While she was gone, Casey looked around. Another room that was lived in. More formal, of course, being the dining room, but the sideboard was covered with books and magazines and school papers, and even a few empty bowls and a half-filled glass of something that was probably orange juice. The table itself didn’t look like it was actually used for family dinners, but served as a catch-all for whatever didn’t have a home elsewhere.
Casey stepped into the kitchen and took some time studying the collage that was the refrigerator: school menus, report cards, church calendars, grocery lists, magnets that took many forms—owls, motorcycles, pharmacy info
rmation, Garfield—and, of course, the gamut of photos. Those ranged from senior pictures to Christmas cards to casual family shots. Again, Casey was shocked at how alike Betsy and Elizabeth were, and she was taken aback even more at the photos of a girl who had to be Betsy’s daughter. She was in elementary school, but already looked like a younger version of Elizabeth.
“That’s my daughter,” Betsy said at Casey’s shoulder. “Junie, we call her. Born in the summer. She’s nine. Cutest thing ever, of course.” She smiled. “Third grade and giggly as anything. Billy is seventeen. Not exactly a giggler. I was still in high school myself when he was born. Got married when I was eighteen, but we’d already had him before then. He’s a good boy. Gets good grades, plays soccer. Worst thing he’s ever done was to be late for school once last month. He’s kind of moody, especially this past month, but that’s to be expected with a senior, right?” She cleared her throat. “Sorry. You probably don’t want to know all about their lives. That’s my husband, Scott.” She pointed to the man in the family picture, a nice-looking guy with a cheesy grin, messy black hair, and wire-rimmed glasses. Casey liked him on sight.
“I didn’t mean to snoop,” Casey said.
“It’s no problem. We don’t have anything you shouldn’t see. Or, if we do, it’s buried under piles of laundry.” Which could easily have been the case, seeing how the small sitting room across the kitchen’s island had clothes mountains to rival the Rockies.
Betsy tipped a Marshland Elementary lunch calendar to the side to show a picture underneath—the same one Eric had found when they’d looked up Elizabeth’s disappearance on the Internet. “Lizzie’s last school photo.” Her smile faltered. “We used to pretend we were twins sometimes.” She looked at the photo for a few more seconds before allowing the menu to hide it again. “Come see what I found.”
Betsy and Eric had moved the mess on the dining room table to one side, and Betsy placed two boxes on the cleared end. “This box is just photo albums and stuff from when I was little. Lizzie would be in there, especially before high school, when her mom was still around. After she died, well, it seems like they would have come around more, doesn’t it? But Uncle Cyrus sort of …I don’t know…it was almost as if he thought he and Lizzie had suddenly become this burden on us. And he was so angry about it all. About Lizzie’s mom dying. I still saw Lizzie at school, and at church when they’d show up, but it wasn’t like it had been.”
Casey looked at a photo Betsy put on the table. Elizabeth appeared just about as she did on that last school photo. Cyrus seemed healthy and happy, and the woman—“What was her name?”
“Vivian. Vivvie, Cyrus would call her. To me she was Aunt Viv.”
“How did she die? Cancer?”
“Pancreatic. It was like one day she was fine, and the next she was dying. It was terrible. You can’t see it in this picture, even though five months later she was dead. I remember, because we all got our family portraits done at the same time, at church, you know, when we made a new directory. The pictures were taken in the fall the year before everything happened with Cyrus and Elizabeth. By the time Christmas came around they didn’t even send out the photo with their cards because Aunt Viv looked like a different person by then.” She rubbed her finger gently across the photo, then heaved a huge album out of the box. “These are just random shots from when we were kids. This and that. But here—” she turned to the back pages “—this is the nineties, when we were teens. There’s Liz and Wayne Greer and me and Scott. I had just found out I was pregnant. I hadn’t told Scott yet, but Lizzie knew. She was younger than the rest of us, but she was my cousin, so she hung out with me and my friends.”
Betsy looked remarkably carefree in the picture, for having such a heavy secret. Perhaps it hadn’t quite sunk in yet. Or perhaps she really didn’t care that her “innocent” teenage years were about to come to a crashing end.
“What about Elizabeth and Wayne?” And why did that name sound familiar?
“They weren’t actually an item, at least, not yet. If he’d had his way they would’ve been married already.” She laughed. “Not really, but he had it bad for her. I’m pretty sure she was in love with him, too, but you know how it can be when you’re teenagers and friends and you don’t want to mess things up. This was taken just before her dad lost his job. Aren’t too many pictures after that.” She paged through. “Look, there’s a copy of the one Lizzie took of Uncle Cyrus for that job application.”
Cyrus Mann looked serious, but not unpleasant. His hair was slicked back, and he’d shaved, so it must have been after the casual shot by the car. He wore a clean, button-down shirt, and he smiled gently, showing no teeth. His eyes were deep and dark, and revealed a depth of sorrow with which Casey could relate. “Did he get the job?”
“Never found out. It was soon after that he was—he died. It became a nonissue, especially since Lizzie disappeared.” She sat down, the enjoyment she’d shown at seeing the old pictures draining away. “So she’s really gone? You finally found her, and she’s…gone?”
“I’m sorry.”
She didn’t speak again for a few minutes, while she warred with her emotions. She idly paged through the album, her jaw set in that way people do when they’re trying not to cry. Suddenly she stood, put the album back in the box, and pulled the other box closer. “This is what I really wanted you to see.” She reached in and took out a folder, which she laid on the table. It was fat and tattered, with papers sticking out the sides, and scribbled notes on the cover. “I kept a whole file of everything from after it all happened, along with whatever else I could find. It was so…I felt guilty, of course, and sad.” She swallowed. “And also scared. If it could happen to Lizzie…” She let out a breath and picked at the folder before finally opening it, revealing a stack of newspaper clippings, hand-written notes, photos, and scrap bits of paper. She held out the top one, and Casey took it. Eric looked over her shoulder. It said simply, “Dad call,” along with a number.
“That’s my handwriting,” Betsy said. “A cop left a message on the answering machine, asking my dad to call down to the station. Didn’t say why. I didn’t really take any notice. I was a teenager, you know?” She sniffed. “That piece of paper changed my life. Changed all our lives. I dug it out of the trash because, well, I’m not sure why. It just felt wrong to throw it away, like it was any old message.”
She took back the paper and laid it face down on the open side of the folder.
“This is the very first news article. The Denver Post. First time Marshland had made that paper in ages. Usually they pretend we’re not here, since all we have is your usual small town kind of news, but this…I guess it was going to sell papers.”
The headline screamed, MAN MURDERED, TEENAGE GIRL MISSING, which was a minor variation of the article Casey and Eric had found earlier.
“If you read it you’ll see they make a big deal about the fact that our cops aren’t big town, like if only they had been, the murder would have been solved overnight, and Liz would be back home. Or Uncle Cyrus wouldn’t have been killed in the first place.” She shook her head. “Our cops may work in a small town, but they’re smart. And they care about us.” She smoothed her hand over the paper, then turned it over to join the scrap message. “It wasn’t until the next day that the papers said anything that might have actually been true.” She handed Casey another article, and Casey read it.
“It says here he was involved with some shady people,” Casey said, referring to a quote from someone who said she saw some people hanging around Mann’s car during the previous week. “Do you know who they might be?”
“No idea. But I don’t believe it. Uncle Cyrus may have been stubborn, and maybe a little stupid for living in that car, but he wasn’t a bad guy. He wouldn’t have done anything dangerous. Not with Liz around. He knew if he got desperate he could come to us.”
“This person still around?”
“Nope. Died several years ago. I never was quite sure if she was telli
ng the truth, anyway, or just wanted the attention.”
“How about your dad? You think he would know who these bad influences were?”
Betsy sat back and pushed the folder toward Casey, who kept it going toward Eric. He pulled up a chair and began going through the stack.
“Dad’s around, sure, but I doubt he knew anything. Uncle Cyrus and he really didn’t talk much. Dad tried, but…I didn’t even tell him about what you said during our phone call yesterday. He gave me the message, and I said I’d take care of it. I was waiting to see…I was hoping…No point in hoping now, is there? I mean, I’m assuming Lizzie didn’t have any family we should know about?”
“Not as far as we know. Or my brother knows.”
“Your brother?”
“Her boyfriend. The one who’s in jail but didn’t kill her. The one in the picture.”
“Right.” She looked at Casey briefly, then stood up. “I guess I should call and tell my father. Or maybe I’ll just go over. He’s working. The bank.” She hesitated. “Do you want to stay here?”
“If you’re comfortable with that.”
She lifted her hands, then let them fall. “It’s fine. Go ahead and look through the box. I’ll be back to help with whatever I can.”
“Betsy. Thanks.”
She nodded. “Whatever I can do for Lizzie.”
The door closed behind her, and Casey stood to look in the box. The first thing she saw was a school paper, an essay about “My Dream: Finding a Cure for Cancer.” The name on the top was Elizabeth Mann, and the grade was an A+. The teacher had written a note in red, which said:
“Wonderful paper, Elizabeth! Your mother would be proud. It is easy to imagine you being successful in this goal. You will change the world!”
A prophet, she was not.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Casey and Eric sat quietly going through the box contents, speaking only when one of them found something new and interesting. Most of the items were yellowed articles rehashing the bloody facts, delving into Cyrus and Elizabeth’s private lives (“What kind of a father has his daughter living in a Chevy?”), and making much of the fact that this “small town” police department hadn’t found either the killers or the girl. There weren’t even suspects discussed, other than the brief flirtation with Elizabeth. As far as anyone was willing to say, it was someone with a big gun. That about summed up the communal knowledge. Not exactly inspiring. The papers were much freer with the death itself.
Dying Echo: A Grim Reaper Mystery (Grim Reaper Series) Page 17