The Three Beths

by Jeff Abbott

  “Hi, Detective Garza, I’m Mariah Dunning.”

  “Hi. Just a minute.” He got up and walked over to an older woman who was standing closer to the playscape, spoke to her, she nodded. He returned and sat down next to Mariah.

  “My friend is a nanny for another family. She’ll keep an eye on my granddaughters while we talk. But this time is precious to me, OK? Don’t waste it.” His tone wasn’t unkind, but it was firm.

  “Yes, sir. Hal Blevins.”

  “I remember. He took the overdose at home. His daughter and a friend, a boy, found him.”

  “Andy Candolet?”

  “Yeah. Big kid. Looked like a young Clark Kent. I remember him, too.”

  “Was there anything suspicious about the death?”

  He considered her. “How are you a friend of the family?”

  She explained, without too much detail. “I wondered if there was an obvious reason for the suicide, or if it seemed like it could have been…”

  “Murder. You can say it.”

  “Yes.”

  “It wasn’t a murder. He left a note. No sign anyone had poured the pills or the liquor down his throat.”

  “What did the note say?”

  “I don’t remember the exact wording. Just that he was very sorry and that he loved his wife and daughter. It was short.”

  “I understand he was a recovering alcoholic. I found his sobriety chits taped in a journal.”

  “He laid out those sobriety chips on the coffee table.”

  She could imagine Bethany gathering them up, preserving them in her notebook. “Do you know many alcoholics that drink their way out?”

  He shrugged. “The concern was where had he gotten all the pills. Because neither he nor his wife had a prescription for tranquilizers. We checked.”

  “Did Sharon know?”

  “No. We found a guy he worked with who had a side business with black market painkillers. We think he supplied him. The guy denied it up and down. But we never found out for sure.”

  “He must have been drinking all day to have killed himself.”

  “It was more the pills. He took more than enough. He had maybe been dead an hour when his daughter got home from school, but she thought at first he was sick and just taking a nap—he had told them he was taking a sick day, and Mrs. Blevins had a job as an office manager downtown, so he was alone all day. He was in pajamas and robe. The suicide note was in the robe pocket. Along with the boarding pass.”

  “Boarding pass?”

  “To Houston. He had booked himself on a flight for that night.”

  “Houston,” she said slowly. “Why would he buy an airline ticket if he was going to kill himself?”

  “I don’t know. According to his wife—and she was hysterical—there was no reason for him to go to Houston. Unless he’d planned to go there and kill himself and changed his mind. The ticket was one-way, no return flight booked. He might as well have decided to end his life at home.”

  Pills that he shouldn’t have had. A ticket that made no sense.

  “How were Sharon and Bethany? I mean, obviously, this was horrifying.”

  Garza took a deep breath. “The daughter, she was devastated. She couldn’t believe it. I mean, unless the suicidal person has attempted before or has a long history of depression…people generally can’t believe they’ve done it.” He cleared his throat, watching his granddaughters, then yelling, “Joanna, don’t let Esme get too dirty, please! Her mom will yell at me! Thank you!” while Joanna waved him off with a flap of the hand. He continued: “Depression at that level is not normally a thing you can conceal, but I guess he managed. She seemed a sweet kid.”

  “And Sharon?”

  Garza winced as Esme, hanging from the monkey bars, dropped to the soft ground. The girl giggled. “It’s no one’s finest hour. Sharon Blevins was mostly worried about her kid. She was afraid that he’d talked to her daughter before he died, she couldn’t be convinced he was already dead when Bethany arrived…she kept asking Bethany, ‘What did he say, what did he say?’ I thought she meant he would have given a reason. Only after we found the ticket did I think maybe she meant something else.” He watched his granddaughters chase each other, a smile touching his lips. “I thought really Mrs. Blevins wanted to protect her daughter. And I’m sure she did. But I think she was scared at first the dad told Bethany something else. Something Mrs. Blevins didn’t want told. You know, like a confession. Sometimes people decide on suicide because they did something bad and don’t want to face the consequences. I thought, given the mother’s concern, maybe he had confessed a reason to the daughter, you know, in the days leading up to it.”

  “Did you ask Bethany?”

  “I asked if she knew why her dad had done this. She said no. I believed her.”

  “And Sharon gave no explanation?”

  “No. And in a way, I mean, she was upset, she was distraught, like you would expect, but I thought maybe she was…relieved.”

  “As if she was out of danger? Maybe he was abusive?”

  “No signs of abuse on her, and when we asked if he’d ever hurt her, she got upset and said no, never.”

  “So, she was relieved for another reason.”

  “I would suppose.” He shrugged. “He drank the booze, he took the pills. That was unusual; most men use a gun or a rope. But she said they’d never owned a gun. But I also took it that there was no alcohol normally in the house. He was recovering and she was religious, if I recall.”

  “Yes,” she said, sounding flat. “So he had to stockpile the booze and the pills. He had to plan it.”

  “Unless he found a delivery service, yes.”

  Esme and her sister ran to their grandfather in the middle of the game of tag, tagged him, informed him that he was it. “Anything else? This is precious time to me with the girls.”

  “Was there any mention of a Penny? By Bethany or her mother?”

  For a long moment it was as if Garza forgot the granddaughters who were waiting for him. “Not from them. On the note. He’d written it in pencil. And he’d tried to erase a line.”

  “Yes?”

  “It said, ‘I’m sorry about Penny.’ He’d nearly erased it all. It was down by the bottom of the page. Like a postscript. I asked Mrs. Blevins what it meant. It’s unusual to see erasure on a suicide note—usually they just start over and write a fresh one. It’s the last communication they make to the world, so they want it to be neat and clear. I thought it odd. She said she didn’t know. I assumed perhaps it was a girlfriend.”

  “And you didn’t dig into it further?” she asked, blurting out the question before she thought.

  “Welcome to the reality of police work. It was a suicide. There was absolutely no suspicion of murder. It’s not the police’s job to solve the mystery of that man’s life. Just that no one else killed him.”

  “I understand. I think I know who Penny is.”

  “Who?”

  “A woman in Houston. A neighbor of theirs. Her phone number was written in Bethany’s address book. But Mrs. Blevins told people they moved here from Chicago, that they never lived in Houston.”

  “Maybe it was an affair?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. She felt cold. “Is there anything else you remember that was unusual? Was there any hint he’d been involved in a crime? Or maybe a hit-and-run?”

  “None,” he said. “Do you know of a crime?”

  She shook her head.

  Eben Garza studied her for a moment. “Well…did you know that Blevins was her name, not his?”

  “What?”

  “I talked to his employer, you know, just to see if he had said anything at work to indicate there was a problem, and he told me that Blevins was Sharon Blevins’s maiden name and Hal took it later in life. His job experience before was all in Houston, and his name then was Hal Meadows.”

  “Meadows.”

  “Yeah. But Mrs. Blevins told me privately when I asked her about this that when he
was a drunk, he cheated on her and she made him take her name as a condition of getting back together. He agreed. She said her daughter didn’t know, only remembered Blevins as their name. I did call the last place he worked in Houston, and they confirmed they’d had to let him go. There had been an issue with drinking on the job and sleeping with a coworker. He had no criminal record.”

  She could see Sharon striking this bargain. “Meadows. All right. You wouldn’t remember the name of that company would you?”

  “No, sorry. Long time ago.”

  “Thank you for taking the time to talk to me.”

  His stern expression softened. “Are you all right? I feel like I gave you bad news.”

  I’m sorry about Penny.

  “It’s all right. I just appreciate this so much. Thank you.”

  She said goodbye to Garza, thanked him again, and sat for a moment, watching him go play with his giggling granddaughters.

  Penny was tied to Hal’s suicide. She opened her phone’s browser and searched for “Hal Meadows Houston.”

  She found a few hits, some from recent years involving other men with the same name. Then she found one, from many years ago, a man with a slight resemblance to Bethany—he’d won an award from an advertising professional group. He stood awkwardly at a podium, accepting the award. Nothing else on him. He’d worked for an agency called Harper & Smythe. They’d shut down six years ago.

  She searched for “Sharon Meadows.” She found a wedding announcement between Sharon and Hal; they looked young, hopeful, and happy. Not much else, although Sharon had later won the award for Volunteer of the Year at Holy Innocents School.

  “Bethany Meadows.” Just a birth announcement.

  She looked at the results of her earlier Houston hit-and-run search. Then she added another search term: “Penny.”

  She held her breath and waited.

  Lots of results…but all with the word Penny marked out. A dead end.

  So what was Hal sorry about with Penny?

  She needed to talk again to Penny. And to Sharon.

  45

  H​ER MIND WAS full of what Sharon knew or what Sharon might know or what Sharon had hidden. So Mariah found herself driving to Sharon’s house, unsure of what she would say but ready to confront her with her questions.

  She seemed…relieved.

  Mariah drove by Sharon’s house. Andy’s car was outside. Why was he here now? She drove past the house. Instinct took hold. She drove down the street, around the corner, and parked out of sight so Andy wouldn’t see her car.

  She walked to the front door, and she could hear the raised voices in violent argument. Sharon yelling at him, “This is all your fault!”

  She didn’t knock or ring the doorbell. Maybe it would be valuable to know what they were saying. And not have them know she heard.

  She eased open the backyard gate and snuck close to the window of the breakfast nook. She could hear a distant murmur of voices. One man, one woman. She listened.

  The words were quieter now, indistinct. She heard “I promised” and “Bethany” and “never again.” Sharon’s voice got louder. Then quiet.

  Then they were in the kitchen. Mariah risked a quick look through the window. Sharon at the sink, filling a glass with water. Andy in the doorway, still talking. She ducked down again before they could see her.

  “Can’t you find out what she knows?” he asked.

  “I’ll try.”

  “You don’t want her digging too deep, Sharon.”

  “I know. I know.” Her voice was soft. But sad.

  What is this? Mariah wondered. Had the two of them conspired in Bethany’s disappearance? She could not imagine it of Sharon, who had shown herself to be a devastated mother.

  Mariah hunkered down on the grass, keeping her head close but beneath the window.

  “You didn’t have to talk to her when she showed up at your office,” Sharon said.

  “She’s a Dunning. I had to know why she’d come to see me.”

  Hunkered down below the window, Mariah couldn’t see Sharon’s reaction.

  “You’re way more worried about yourself than worried about me,” Sharon said.

  “Well, this is your problem to solve. And I am worried about you, Sharon,” he said, his voice softening. “You know I’ve always been there for you.”

  “You’re here for me when you can have an advantage over me,” Sharon said, her tone bitter. “I wonder what Julie would say.”

  “You won’t say a word to Julie,” Andy said. It was a sneer. “And you really will have nothing if this goes wrong. We’re both stuck. Let’s make the best of a bad situation. You don’t want to mess up this arrangement for me and Julie.”

  “I thought you loved Julie. That’s rich.”

  “I have a lot of love in me.”

  Something awful, taunting in his tone. Something was wrong here, Mariah thought, oh so wrong.

  “Love for yourself,” Sharon said. “I cannot keep doing this. Just go and let me figure out what to do.”

  Andy didn’t answer. Silence. Silence. Then a gasp.

  Mariah peered through the window.

  Andy, one hand tangled in Sharon’s hair, the other on the small of her back, holding her close. Kissing her deeply. Sharon, not moving, not fighting him, enduring it.

  Then Sharon put her hand on the side of Andy’s face. Like it was all right.

  Mariah ducked back down, her breath gone, holding her gasp of shock inside her throat.

  “You’ve got me good and woke up now,” he said.

  “Go. Not today. No.”

  “You miss me,” he breathed. Sharon murmured something she couldn’t hear.

  He laughed. And he left.

  * * *

  Mariah crouched down on the grass. She waited and then looked again. She watched Sharon drink a glass of water and put the glass in the sink. And then Sharon gripped the edge of the sink and trembled.

  Mariah moved back from the window. She counted to one hundred and eased herself out of the backyard. Andy’s car was gone. She rang the doorbell.

  * * *

  Sharon walked slowly out of the kitchen. The careful web of her life seemed to be coming undone, falling apart, and she went to the armchair where she’d hidden the gun next to the seat cushion.

  She had left it there, just in case. But Mariah wasn’t coming back to this house unless Sharon called her and asked her to visit. She could have turned the gun on Andy, but she needed Andy. As much as she hated to admit it.

  For a moment she thought of turning the gun on herself. End it all. But she was, at the same time, too scared and too hopeful that this would somehow get better.

  Hal died in that chair. I should have thrown it out.

  The doorbell rang. She peered through the peephole.

  Mariah.

  Sharon ran back to the armchair, made sure the gun was properly hidden, and then took a deep breath and went to the door.

  * * *

  Sharon opened the door, looking gaunt. “I told you not to come back here.” But she didn’t shut the door.

  “What does he have on you? Andy?”

  “What?” She took a step back.

  “What does he have on you? That he can force himself on you like that in your own home. You can be rid of him. I’ll help you.”

  Sharon looked at her in absolute shock. Her mouth moved but no words came. She moved into the den and sat in the armchair. “Can’t you just leave us alone?”

  That Sharon was sitting was a good idea, Mariah decided. She showed a willingness to talk. Mariah sat down across from Sharon on the couch.

  “So many pieces, slowly falling into place.” Mariah made her voice a whisper. “It’s not hard to realize what the biggest leverage over you would be. Andy was here when Bethany found your husband dead. Does he know the truth about your husband?”

  “Truth?”

  “I called a number that was written down in some of Bethany’s papers. A woman named Penny
answered.”

  Sharon went pale. “You called Penny.”

  “So, let’s see. Penny knew your family and lived in a city where you claim you never lived. You and your husband changed your name from Meadows—but to your maiden name. Probably much easier, right? Even though it’s not that common. Penny was at Holy Innocents School with your daughter, right?”

  Sharon didn’t move, didn’t react.

  “Your husband wrote in his suicide note that he was sorry about Penny. What does that mean?”

  “How do you know…”

  “I talked to Penny. She said Bethany was writing something about Hal, but that Penny barely remembered you all as family friends. Why would Bethany call her? Why would he apologize for her? Did he do something to her? Hurt her?”

  Sharon said nothing. Did not seem inclined to speak.

  “And Bethany started writing a book. About a suicide driven by a cover-up over a child run down by a hit-and-run driver.”

  Sharon made a noise in her throat.

  “You can trust me with what you know,” Mariah said. “If it has nothing to do with my mom, I won’t tell anyone. But if you don’t tell me, I’ll put Reveal on the trail of this story, and you know how hungry he is for a big story to tell. Talk or silence. Me or him.”

  “If I tell you, and you see this has nothing to do with your mom, will you stay silent?”

  “You’ll have to risk it. I won’t make a promise to you just to break it, Sharon. But I will call Reveal if you don’t tell me.”

  Sharon took a deep breath. “The only Penny I know,” she said, “is dead.”

  * * *

  Mariah let the words slide over her. “I talked to her.”

  “That’s not possible.” Sharon’s hands were trembling.

  “Who is she?”

  Silence moved over them both like a wave. Sharon closed her eyes, opened them, seemed to fight for both breath and words. “She was a girl. Same age as Bethany. Not a neighbor. They lived a couple of miles away. We were casual friends with her parents; the girls were in preschool together. Hal worked with her mother.”