by Jeff Abbott
“I wonder if the mall has parking lot security tapes.” Mariah’s tone had calmed, become thoughtful. “I could ask.”
Craig took a deep breath. “Mariah, stop right now. You are not calling the mall and asking them to review security tapes. They will ban you from going back there. You drove recklessly, you damaged a police car, and the only reason the cops didn’t arrest you and haul you off to jail is because they felt bad for you.”
Mariah didn’t like these words, so she ignored them. “I really thought it was Mom. I did.”
“I know you think you did, sweetheart. I know. What I wouldn’t give to see her…” His deep voice cracked, and he took a deep breath. “Can we please talk about what all you had in your car? Wrist ties and guns and a Taser? Who are you planning to kidnap?” His gaunt face was pale with worry.
Mariah set her tea down. “I told you, I legally bought the guns and the gear.”
“Why would you have an armory in your car, sweetheart?”
“I have to be prepared for when I find Mom in case bad people have her. Dad, it’s OK, I took classes on how to use this stuff.”
He sat across from her, took her hands in his. “Classes?”
“And I watched online videos.”
“Honey, you are not some sort of bounty hunter or movie detective. Mariah, this stops now. You can’t do this to yourself. Or to me.” His voice cracked.
“The police quit looking,” she said. “Someone has to find Mom. Find out what happened to her.”
“I love you so much. But you didn’t see your mom today,” he said. “Do you understand that, Mariah? That woman wasn’t your mom. This is…this is your grief playing tricks on your mind.”
Her voice shook. “Even if…I still have to know what happened to her. I have to know who took her from us.” She fought to keep her voice steady. “I have to know.”
“No, you don’t! I mean…not like this. We just have to keep the faith the police will find her someday. But you, you stay out of it.”
Mariah took a deep breath. “Dad, I never got the chance to fix things with her. I…”
“I don’t know how to make this right for you. I wish I did. I wish I could make people understand how hard this is for us. More than anything.”
Because of Lakehaven, Mariah thought. Because of so many people who had been sure her father had killed her mother, somehow made her body vanish. Although there was no evidence. No proof. And no other suspects in their circle of friends and acquaintances. Only the low, ceaseless whisper of innuendo and hearsay against her father. But that constant drip was poison enough to nearly kill a man, leave him a shell. Beth Dunning had never reappeared—not on a credit history, not with a phone call, not on a security camera. She had stepped out of the world.
“Let me fix us a late lunch,” Mariah said. They’d abandoned their meals at the food court. Craig usually cooked; he was much better at it than Mariah. But she wanted to do something nice for him.
“No, I’ll fix it. You want a grilled cheese?”
She nodded and hugged him, and to Mariah he felt like skin and bones underneath the jeans and the Lakehaven basketball booster club shirt, faded in the years since she had played on the team. I’m sorry, Dad, she thought to herself.
Craig turned away and padded over to the refrigerator. He got out butter and sliced cheddar, set a pan on the stove, and began to assemble a cheese sandwich, melting butter in the skillet. “This feels like a point of no return. We can’t do this again. You could have hurt yourself badly. You could have hurt a police officer. Or an innocent person. Do you think this town would ever forgive us for anything more? I’m not going back to people throwing rocks at the house or spray painted threats in the middle of the night. I’m not putting you through that again.”
The phrases KILLER LIVES HERE and WHERE IS BETH, CRAIG? had been painted in bright red on their garage door. She would never forget. Some of the neighbors had helped them clean it up—but she could see the doubt in their faces. “Dad…”
“I think we need to have a service for your mom,” he said. “We have to wait for her to be missing seven years to have her declared legally dead.” Craig bit his lip. “But…maybe we go ahead and have a memorial of some sort. We let her go.”
“No.” She shook her head.
He met her gaze, and there was a steadiness there she hadn’t seen from him in a long time. “This grief…Fine, it can ruin me. But it cannot ruin you. You have to move forward with your life. What if your clients hear about today?”
“How would anyone hear?” Mariah was a freelance web designer. She only had three steady clients, the largest one a hip clothing boutique, which did a high volume of online sales.
“People talk on social media. They’re a damn lynch mob. Maybe someone recorded your scene at the mall on their phone. Or took a picture of you being put in the police cruiser. Maybe someone posts it. You think there wasn’t someone from Lakehaven in that food court? And the police blotter, they post that in the town paper. It’ll be on the Lakehaven news website.” His voice cracked. “This can’t happen. Not everyone looking at you this way…”
She had no answer to this. She thought of the teenager with a raised smartphone, aimed at her. People were so ready to record the awful moments for someone else. She could imagine the status posting: Girl hallucinates seeing missing mother in food court, ends up in car crash with cops. Surely no one would be that cruel. Then surely, she knew, they would.
“I could go see a therapist,” she said quietly. “If you want me to. You said so to the cops.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary.” Craig eased the hot sandwich out of the pan, put it on a plate, and cut it into three equal strips, just how Mariah liked it. He handed her the plate and started making a sandwich for himself. Not looking at her, wanting, she thought, for the conversation to be over. Any time she’d mentioned talking to someone professional, a grief counselor, a psychiatrist, he’d resisted. Now he had lied to the police. She could go herself. She was an adult. But if he didn’t like it, it felt like a betrayal. She thought he must worry about what she would say about him: Everyone thinks my dad is guilty, and I don’t, but…what if…
She sat down with the sandwich, but it had no taste; the butter and cheese and soft bread just felt like grease in her mouth. “I mean, I’m surprised you don’t want me to talk to a therapist.”
“All it does is make people miserable. We have to learn how to deal with grief on our own,” Craig said. “And I want you to stop this idea of finding whoever took your mom. The police, it’s their job, leave it alone. Promise me you’ll stop.”
He waited. She wanted to say, The idea of finding Mom is my therapy. It’s the only thing that makes me feel better. Instead she said, “I promise.”
And then a vicious little voice, borne of hurt and pain and sadness, said in the back corner of her brain, Why doesn’t Dad want you to see a therapist or find out the truth? Why?
And she strangled that little voice in her mind, quickly, before it could speak its poison again.
3
CRAIG CURLED UP into his leather recliner in front of a huge flat-screen television. He fired up one of the streaming services. He would binge through hours of shows, often mesmerized for most of the night. He slept very little, cocooned in the soft glow of the stories. Many nights he just slept in the recliner, which worried Mariah. It seemed unhealthy, but her attempts to get him to sleep normal hours all failed.
Mariah told him she was going to her room to read. She had stopped watching much TV: crime dramas made her edgy, and reality shows were full of people with invented problems. Books had been her refuge. She shut the bedroom door and leaned her head against the wood.
She hadn’t come up here to read.
She locked the door, quietly. Dad could always seem to hear the lock clicking into place, and in those dark days after Mom disappeared he had been afraid Mariah would hurt herself. She had been afraid of the same with him. She dimmed th
e lights. She lit a candle her mother had given her on her fifteenth birthday. She thought candles made for crappy gifts, but this one she had liked. It smelled of vanilla and cinnamon, and she only lit it when it was time for her quiet secret ritual. It made her think of Mom, the warmth of her hugs, the smell of her skin, the strength of her.
They could laugh, even during the fights, the disagreements, the screaming matches of her teenage years. She loved her mother so much, and sometimes she’d acted like she hated her. She’d never told Mom how much she loved her. This failure seemed to widen the hole in her heart.
She stepped inside her small closet and reached behind her hanging clothes. She slowly eased out a large corkboard. Papers and photos were pinned to it. Pictures of Mom, printouts of news accounts when she vanished, sketches of men from around the country who were suspected in the disappearances of women. There were printouts of postings by a true-crime blogger and podcaster who wrote under the name “Reveal” and had taken an interest in her mother’s case. A schedule of the day she’d last been seen: March fourth. The bits and pieces of her mother’s case, and she’d mounted them like she was a detective on a TV show, or Claire Danes on Homeland hunting a terrorist, trying to see the data and the connections all at once, spot the unseen ties that would lead her to the truth. She used to sleep with the corkboard over her bed, as if the data would sift down into her mind and reveal the answers in her dreams. But she never remembered her dreams since Mom vanished, even if she awoke sweating and confused and near to tears. Her father had told her, in a quavering voice, to stop this foolishness and take the corkboard down. He told her this wasn’t healthy. She thought it was all that was keeping her balanced. She told him she’d thrown it all away, but instead she’d just slid it into the closet behind her clothes.
She hadn’t added anything to the board in a long while. There was nothing new to say.
She sat at her laptop and started to type in what she always did for the ritual: Beth Dunning disappearance Austin
The results appeared. The news stories from the time, both from the Austin and Lakehaven papers and from the local news stations. Her mother’s story hadn’t gotten much national coverage, a bit on CNN and some of the others, and then the world moved on. She knew most of them by heart. And the entries from Reveal’s crime blog—but there was a new entry under Reveal’s blog entries.
She clicked on it.
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
There are certain cases that I’ve written about numerous times. One of those is of Bethany “Beth” Blevins Curtis, who left Austin eighteen months ago in an apparent desertion of her husband. But since taking a flight to Houston she has made no subsequent contact with friends or family and has not left any kind of digital trail. No one has seen her. Six months later, Beth Dunning of Lakehaven, a suburb of Austin, also vanished, her car found at an empty lot in the hills above Lakehaven, where she and her husband were planning on building a home and where she often went for quiet time.
Two Beths, vanishing without a trace from the same city in less than a year.
A six-month interlude is consistent with certain serial killer cycles…but have you ever heard of a serial killer who chooses victims with a particular name? I haven’t. And I haven’t found a notice of another Beth disappearing this past year, though, for which we should be grateful there is not a name-obsessed serial killer lurking in our fair city (for a history of Austin and serial killers, see my earlier series of podcasts on America’s first serial killer, who terrorized Austin in the 1880s, known as the Midnight Assassin, also known as the Servant Girl Annihilator). But wouldn’t the psychology of someone who so hated a name that he had to kill victims bearing it be fascinating? Of course, neither woman’s body has turned up to suggest a serial killer, so this is likely a coincidence, but an interesting one.
I noticed this unhappy coincidence when I was writing up my exciting new Calendar of Unsolved Cases, a new feature on the website that will link to my previous blogs and podcasts, tied to the major date of each case. These are two very different disappearances, but the names and the time frame struck me. I think it’s always interesting to look for coincidences and see if they are something more.
Is it not the most human endeavor to seek the pattern of order in chaos?
If you agree, then hit up my PaySupport, so I can keep doing this podcast for you…
To seek the pattern of order in chaos. Yes. Mariah almost nodded at the screen. Patterns must be found. That was what she needed: a pattern, an explanation that made sense in a world that didn’t.
She clicked on all the links to the Beth Curtis case.
The first was to an article from a tech news website on the disappearance. Bethany Blevins Curtis. Dark shoulder-length hair, wide mouth, cheekbones that Mariah envied, nice smile, age twenty-seven. She worked as an office manager for a transportation company in south Austin. She was married to a man who was a rising star in technology, CEO and founder of a small software company preparing for a public offering of its stock, valued at millions. Mariah tried to remember if she’d heard about this case, but she didn’t watch the local news much before Mom vanished. And, as she read, she agreed with Reveal: this might not even have been a disappearance as much as an abandonment.
On September 4 eighteen months ago, Bethany Blevins Curtis had apparently left her home in north Austin, taken a few hundred dollars out of the joint banking account shared with her husband, boarded a Southwest Airlines flight, and flown the short jaunt to Houston. A security camera caught her walking alone through the Hobby Airport terminal. That security video was posted on a Faceplace page dedicated to her, apparently run by a friend: Bethany Curtis in a crowd, dark hair, floppy brown hat pulled low, a muted scarf tied around her throat, dark glasses. Glancing over her shoulder. Somehow, she had eluded the cameras in the airport; they’d lost her in the crowds. Did someone pick her up? Did she already arrange for a car to be there waiting? Did she shed her coat and scarf and hat and walk undetected? She was simply gone.
This case wasn’t like her mother’s. Mom had not made a withdrawal from a bank account or flown on a plane and been spotted in the airport security videos. Mom had gone to work at the software company where she was a sales rep, left for lunch, and had never been seen again. Beth Dunning’s car had been found parked near some property in Lakehaven she and Dad owned and had been planning to build a house on. Mom had always liked being out on the property, a large empty lot with a stunning view. It was peaceful, and she liked to talk about the house they would build. It was a place she went for quiet, to escape the pressure and busyness of her job, imagining the house that would stand there one day, with its lovely views of the hills of Lakehaven.
Reveal was right: the only similarities were the name Beth, that the women’s residences were separated by a matter of a few miles, and the short time frame between cases.
But…but…She went back to the links on the Curtis case. The other Beth left behind a husband, Jake, a software entrepreneur who steadfastly claimed he had nothing to do with her disappearance. He had a company that went public a few months after Bethany disappeared—apparently his investors stuck with him. He’d made millions. That got some press from both local media and the tech industry media, as if perhaps he’d gotten rid of his wife so as not to share his new wealth.
He’d been accused, just like her father.
Mariah read a follow-up article at the one-year anniversary…Bethany Curtis had still not left any kind of digital trail. No use of credit cards, no withdrawals from her bank, no pinging of her cell phone by towers. She had left her life, then left…everything else.
Mariah printed out the articles on Bethany Curtis and pinned them in an empty corner of Mom’s corkboard. She placed the photo of Bethany Curtis next to Mom’s.
The names.
The short time span between their disappearances.
The proximity of their homes, their lives.
The surprising lack of evidence in both cases.
As if care was taken.
Despite their differences, there were these similarities.
And she had nothing else. She literally had no other clues to follow as a thread. This was it. Her other option was to chase shadows in the mall, humiliate herself in front of her father and the police.
And then she made up her mind. She had to know. The time span, the similarity of the names, no trail for either of them…this was a hunger suddenly, a need to know that gnawed at her. She would find the pattern, if it was there.
And if there was any way to make the connection back to her mother.
She emailed Reveal: Hi, Chad. Read your post about my mom and Beth Curtis. Want to meet me for a drink tonight? I wonder if you’re right about patterns.
Reveal’s answer came faster than she thought it would: I sure would.
Meeting him was defying Dad. So she wouldn’t tell Dad.
4
MARIAH ASKED REVEAL if they could meet for a margarita at a Lakehaven Tex-Mex restaurant in a busy shopping center off Loop 360, and Reveal agreed. When she came downstairs, she found her father asleep in his recliner, a large wineglass empty and a half-empty bottle of merlot next to it, the TV streaming a British crime drama. He’d turned on the subtitles because he sometimes had trouble with the accents, and he kept the television volume turned down at night. Sometimes when she found him this way she would stop and be sure he was still breathing. She knew he had sleeping pills in the house, and sometimes she was afraid he’d swallow them with the nightly wine and leave all this care behind. It was her greatest fear. His chest rose and fell. She watched him sleep for a moment. He wanted to fix everything for her. But she needed to do this, to at least try. She put the wine in the fridge, tucked a blanket around him, turned off the television, and left him a note propped against the wineglass: Meeting a friend over at La Luna. I need a little bit of normal, and I’ll be very careful with your car. Thanks for understanding, Dad. I love you so much. I’ll be home soon.