The Three Beths

by Jeff Abbott

  Leo pulled hard against his leash, eager to explore.

  Every day he missed Beth so badly it was a physical pain and ache. He ambled along the high grass, careful to watch for snakes or anthills, and stopped at the point where he and Beth had imagined the house rising when they sketched their dream on cocktail napkins. He closed his eyes against the steady, damp breeze while Leo snuffed and sighed, breathing in the night.

  Beth. Beth. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

  This land was where he went to remember Beth as he loved her because there was no tombstone for her, no resting place marked with dignity. He used to sing Kiss’s ballad “Beth” to her, as an annoyance or as an apology, and sometimes here he wanted to hum it, but he couldn’t get past a few measures of the melody without his throat closing.

  The light flashed on his face and stayed there. Leo, useless, decided to bark now.

  “Craig.” The light lowered and then he could see the visitor’s face.

  “Dennis. You’re trespassing, but I forgive you.”

  “Why are you out here?”

  “Why do I have to explain myself to you on my own property? Why are you here?”

  “Because I wanted to look around. Maybe I’ll notice something I didn’t notice before. Are you going to complain about me trespassing?”

  “No.”

  “Are you here to grieve?”

  There was a tone in his voice Craig didn’t like.

  “I like coming here to think,” Craig said. “I feel she’s close.”

  “I feel she’s close, too. You didn’t have long to get rid of the body. I suspect she’s near here.” Broussard shuffled his feet. “Do you ever hope I’ll forget, or just let it go?”

  “No. I want you to find out who took her,” Craig said. Leo barked once, twice.

  “Wouldn’t it just be easier to confess? Than to carry around the heaviest secret imaginable?”

  “You’re still mad,” Craig said.

  “You refused to answer every question put to you after your statement. Why?”

  “I had already answered them, and I operated under this delusion you’d go find whoever took her.”

  “You called her at work that day to demand to know if she was having an affair. People heard you arguing with her on the phone.”

  Craig shook his head. “Discussing, not arguing. But what’s the point of nuance with you, Dennis? You’re still mad. About her and me. You should have married your grudge. That’s been your companion for thirty years.”

  The silence was long. Craig realized, suddenly, as Dennis lowered the light from his face, that Dennis was wearing his sidearm. They had never been alone like this together since Beth vanished. He could shoot you out here. No witnesses. He’d be investigating his own crime. He’d walk. Craig tried to grab my gun, you see. I feared for my life. Dread, hot and bright, rose in his chest. “I should go. My daughter is expecting me.”

  “I think we need to talk about your daughter,” Dennis said quietly.

  “My daughter is not your concern.”

  “She is protecting you. She had that DVD, Craig. Maybe she found it. Maybe she couldn’t bear to part with it since it has her mom’s name on it. She’s protecting you, but she can’t do that forever. At some point she’ll crack. At some point she’ll get mad at you and she’ll tell me what she knows. Save her from that decision. Save her from the agony. Confess.”

  “Arrest me if you’re so sure,” Craig said. Leo whined. “Or shoot me. Just don’t shoot my dog.”

  “You’re so ready to think the worst of me,” Dennis said. “Projection is an ugly thing. Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m out here?”

  “There’s nothing to see.”

  “Is there?”

  Craig felt cold.

  “Because I wanted to give you a chance. Because I don’t want to arrest you in front of your daughter.”

  “I didn’t…I don’t understand…”

  Dennis Broussard looked at him for a long moment, and then he knelt and scratched Leo’s huge pointed ears. Leo’s treacherous tail wagged in awful joy.

  He’s bluffing.

  “The very day after that DVD turns up, you start squawking about being harassed again,” Broussard said. “Is that for Mariah’s benefit? So you’re the victim again?”

  “I’m gathering information on who the culprit is.”

  “Like your daughter, huh. The two investigators. You both look foolish.”

  Like he knew something. That was why he was out here. Or he was trying to spook Craig, scare him into a dangerous reaction. He must be bluffing.

  Or he’s behind the harassment. The thought unnerved Craig.

  “What is it? What?” he asked.

  “Good night, Craig. Good night, Leo.” Dennis Broussard walked away from them, into the darkness.

  Leo barked once in farewell, while Craig felt frozen to the stony ground.

  * * *

  Craig’s hands were still shaking when he started to turn into the driveway.

  Then he saw the rock. A new one. He slammed on the brakes before he could hit it.

  He drove around it, slowly, wondering What if it’s not a rock but something worse? and parked in the garage, got Leo settled in the house. He didn’t want Leo to get hurt.

  He went back outside with a flashlight. He unwrapped the rock. It was the same wrapping paper from this morning. The rock was a bit smaller, pale limestone. The message read, IT’S TIME FOR YOU TO GO.

  The same line as the first message. Then it was written:

  I COULD LAND ON SOMEONE’S CAR WHEN SOMEONE DRIVES UNDER THE LAKEHAVEN BRIDGE. DON’T CALL THE COPS, I’LL KNOW IF YOU DO. JUST SELL YR HOUSE AND GO.

  The Lakehaven bridge was a nickname for an old residential street overpass on the edge of Austin and the suburb, and Mariah drove under that bridge often. He stared at the words, and he felt a rage and a fear begin to war in his blood. But he kept his face still. Calm. Because his own cameras were recording him right now. And when he showed this film to Broussard, he wanted to show his calm. Not his rage.

  He folded up the paper, went to his computer, and started up the video feed. The porch video feed was fine. He backed it up, didn’t see anyone, but it didn’t have a view of the driveway, only the walkway up to the house. The camera above the garage was dark. He backed up the recording. Still dark, and then it was clear. And then he saw a hand, holding a paint can, and then the screen filled with black. He went outside. The garage camera’s lens had been sprayed with paint.

  All right. Someone had spotted the cameras. His neighbor Kumar had noticed him installing them; maybe his tormentor was watching as well. The man in the fedora or the man walking his dog. He had the Sean-the-trumpet-player angle to follow further. He had to chase that down. He had nothing else.

  Because now the tormentor had threatened Mariah. Craig didn’t drive enough these days and not under that bridge on his way to the grocery or the bank, about the only places he ever went. This rock, as threat, was meant for her. It was fearmongering, he suspected. How would anyone know when he or Mariah was driving under a bridge? They were just trying to panic him.

  Unless…it was Broussard who made this threat. He could have watched Craig leave, put the rock here, and then followed him to the lot. That made terrible sense. And could the police track where you were, through your phone?

  He could not let Broussard, or anyone else, do this to him and Mariah.

  This was his duty as a father, he felt. He had moved past a regard for law and order long ago—that was for people with normal, untouched lives. He felt sometimes that he lived in an unseen wilderness, hidden under the suburban quiet, a place where laws and norms no longer interested or protected him.

  Don’t call the cops, I’ll know if you do. He weighed his options. Broussard wouldn’t want him to call the cops, most of all. He had to find these people and put an end to their threats. If something happened to him…and Mariah was left alone with this monster watching her…well
, he couldn’t allow that.

  He went to the window and looked out through the small gap in the curtains. Wouldn’t they be watching to see his reaction? Gauge his next step?

  He couldn’t remember the last time these curtains were open. He yanked them apart, the rings rattling on the rod, every light on in the room behind him.

  He raised his middle finger to the neighborhood, held his hand up high.

  Then he checked on the napping Leo and drove to a home supplies store and found a FOR SALE BY OWNER sign. He bought it, and then bought a prepaid phone that came with a voicemail capability. He wrote the burner phone’s number on the blank space on the for sale sign. This way, he figured, he could see who all contacted him about the house and not tie up his own phone with responding to people to whom he had no intention of selling his house.

  Good enough. All he had to do was buy a couple of days of confusion.

  He went and stuck the for sale sign in his front yard.

  See? I’m doing what you told me to do.

  It was going to make so many people happy, him leaving.

  It would buy him precious time while he hunted his enemy.

  22

  M​ARIAH COULDN’T SLEEP, her mind crowded with thoughts of Bethany and Sharon and her own mother and Julie and Andy. She sat up in the dark, turned on the light, wishing she had a book to read. There was a bookshelf in Bethany’s old room as well. A few novels, another Bible.

  And journals. She took one down, glanced through it. It was a series of writing exercises—prompts of a sort. “Describe a character without having her look in a mirror. Write a scene where two characters speak and we know nothing about them—only dialogue, no description. Write a scene where a character dies.”

  And under each prompt was the same florid handwriting she’d seen in the margins of the true crime books. Bethany’s. She wished the book critique group leader, Yvette Suarez, would call her back. She thought writing was so personal—maybe it would show her some aspect of Bethany that was relevant to what had happened to her.

  There were more journals. Some were college workbooks, others were older, from teenage years. Not diaries, exactly, but thoughts of a young woman who wanted to make art. Who wanted to tell stories.

  She slowly turned the pages thinking, Forgive me, Bethany, for prying. Surely Sharon had read these, trying to find some lost scrap of her daughter, hold on to her as if she were still here. Or maybe seeing these words was too painful. Pages were filled with notes for stories, book ideas, episodes for favorite television shows, random wisps of thought that Bethany wanted to build into something bigger. But nothing that seemed to relate specifically to her disappearance.

  The last journal was the oldest, and surprisingly wasn’t full, as though it had been started and then stopped. The penmanship tight and narrow, as though she were gripping her pen in a fury.

  So the doctor said I should write in here about Dad. I don’t know what to say. Who was Hal Blevins, really? I don’t know that I know. He left us. Why do I have to do this? A page a day, the doctor said. Mama’s not writing a page a day, she’s praying and praying and there is no answer to the question, Why did he do this?

  Well, no answer she wants to tell me.

  The entries were like that: short, brief, dodging a truth, a prescription, a bitter pill barely choked down.

  School has been hard since he killed himself. People don’t know what to say to me because I found him. I saw what no child is supposed to see. I can’t even talk to Mom about that. She says, closed book, closed book, it’s all over now. How does she think this? Julie and Andy are no help to me. Julie makes it about her—how does she manage that, we end up talking about our friendship rather than my dad—and Andy tried to kiss me, what’s wrong with him? Now of all times? He said he was trying to comfort me. My dad’s dead, I don’t want a make-out session. He is the walking example of what not to do. And I like Andy but not that way. He comes over to help Mom like mowing the yard or fixing the ceiling fan and that was Dad’s job and I’m not ready for someone else to do it. I have too much to figure out. Dad had no reason to do this, none. Why did he? What broke him?

  Mom knows. She won’t say. I know she knows. She hides it all under her faith. My faith is supposed to be about strength but hers is about…camouflage.

  Bethany’s father Hal was a suicide. Julie told her that at the gym. But his death still seemed to have come as a surprise—so perhaps he had not been chronically depressed. She had feared for her own father’s life in the days following her mom’s disappearance. She paged through the journal. The entries petered out with a final sentence, written alone on one page:

  There are no answers.

  That couldn’t be true. She would not accept that. There had to be. The answers were just waiting to be found.

  So Bethany had wanted to write, maybe starting when her father killed himself, and she had developed an appreciation for true crime, where there were usually twisted reasons for the cruelty of the human heart.

  And that led to a terrible, awful thought: Was her own father’s death a crime? Had she discovered something about it that wasn’t a suicide?

  Mariah turned the page and found more photos of the young girl she’d seen in the newspaper clipping. Taped to the page, four of them. One like the newspaper picture she’d seen, two more from a party in a backyard, a birthday cake behind her, the girl maybe three or four, laughing, hands on knees. The cake was a mermaid, all purple and aqua frosting. One of the other pictures looked like a professional snapshot, the kind parents bought in different sizes from wallet to framed eight by ten. She dug her thumbnail under the photo and pried it loose from the tape. She studied the girl’s face and then turned it over: Penny, 4, Holy I. written in large letters in smeared red ink.

  Who was Penny? She had thought at first the girl in the picture might have been Bethany.

  After a moment, and feeling like she shouldn’t, she slipped the old photo into her pocket. She left the others untouched.

  She turned to the last page in the journal. There, taped to the inside cover, were chits. One week. One month. One year. Five years, ten years. Sobriety chits. She ran a finger along the numbers on the chit. A man who had drunk himself to death with bourbon and pills had been sober for a long time. What had changed in this house?

  Sharon would know. Had Bethany learned it?

  And had any of this somehow connected to her mother?

  She turned out the light and crawled into the missing woman’s childhood bed, pulling the covers over her head.

  23

  S​HARON AWOKE IN the darkness. She listened to the quiet and could hear the softest sound of snoring from the room down the hall. Bethany used to snore in that room, too, loud enough for Sharon to hear, and she would stop when Sharon would tiptoe in and gently touch her shoulder. It used to irritate Sharon, and now what she wouldn’t give to have her daughter home, under her roof, snoring at double the volume.

  She got up.

  She went to the chair where she had hidden the gun. She couldn’t have removed it after Mariah found her in her faint, not without Mariah seeing, but it was shoved so far down in the pillows that Mariah hadn’t noticed.

  In the dark, Sharon held the gun for a moment, then stuffed it back deep into the gap between the chair’s frame and the seat cushion. She listened in the silence, and the sound she missed most of all was that of her daughter, lost in sleep.

  * * *

  Mariah had the dream again. Of course it wasn’t the same dream every time, but the elements remained constant. Her mother, pleading, frightened, confused. Mariah, standing near her, powerless, frozen. Wind in her eyes. The world smearing, and something walking toward them…faceless, enraged, out of focus, but here to take Beth from them.

  Mom’s kidnapper. Mom’s killer.

  The shadow, brought to life.

  The changeling, the boogey man, the monster exposed from a fairy tale.

  “Where is she?” she asked th
e shadow.

  He pointed toward her. Past her, behind her. If she turned around she would see a truth too horrible to imagine. She was terrified to look.

  “Where is she?” she asked again.

  Again, he pointed.

  “Let this go, baby. Don’t look,” Mom said, her voice going from roar to whisper in Mariah’s ear.

  Mariah turned—slowly, feeling the weight of the world pressing on her, crushing her—but she had to see.

  Turn and see who was behind her…see and know the truth…

  And she awoke, screaming, a face inches from hers.

  Sharon Blevins was leaning over her. “Honey. Are you OK? You cried out in your sleep.”

  At first she didn’t know who Sharon was, where she was, and then it came back to her in a rush. “Fine,” Mariah managed. “Sorry I woke you up. I’m supposed to be taking care of you.”

  Sharon sat on the edge of the bed. “I was already awake. I don’t sleep that well anyway most nights. I understand the bad dreams. We talked a lot today about troubling things.”

  “It was just a bad dream.” She dragged her hand across the saliva on her chin, feeling a hot shame. “About my mom. Trying to find her.”

  “All my dreams about Bethany are good,” Sharon said. “She’s here and she’s happy and we’re happy and nobody feels bad or guilty about anything. It’s like an old television show.”

  Mariah wished her dreams were like that. She thought maybe she could get Sharon talking. “Julie mentioned Bethany wanted to be a writer.”

  Sharon shrugged. “Oh, that was just something she said now and then. I don’t see why so many people want to write. Not everything needs to be written down. There’s too much to read anyway.”

  She didn’t want her to write, Mariah thought. There are secrets in this house, and her daughter would have written about them. “Did you not approve?” She kept her tone relaxed and neutral.