by Shawna Seed
Sharlah was shot in the arm.
The cops she’d met would have said something like, an unknown assailant fired on her, striking her in the arm.
Most of the sentences were subject-verb-object, very simple. There were a few errors, too. The phrase 19-years-old didn’t need hyphens, and the writer missed the appositive commas to set off Brian’s name. Tee shirt should have been T-shirt.
She was evaluating the site like an English major. Elizabeth laughed at the absurdity.
And what about the photo? Certainly the police could have obtained it from her school, but why on earth would they choose something so old? The first-grade photo was useless to identify her.
Elizabeth’s eye was drawn back to the photo. She and her mother had made a special shopping trip to Lufkin for a dress, and they’d gone from store to store to store, her mother carrying piles of things into the dressing rooms for her to try. Once they’d found the dress, there had been the hunt for the perfect red knee socks to match, and then a trip to the shoe store for new Mary Janes, and finally, the fabric store for hair ribbons.
When she was younger, she had cherished that memory as proof that her mother loved her, no matter what she’d done later. As an adult, Elizabeth was able to see the desperate, manic quality of her mother’s actions that day.
Turning over the paper, she prepared to start a new list on the back.
Exposure
Would anyone connect librarian Elizabeth Ellsworth of Florida with Sharlah Webb, drug dealer’s girlfriend in Texas?
When people asked where she was from, she always answered, “I was born in Louisiana.”
Blonde hair, blue eyes, 5 foot 3 – that description wasn’t specific enough to give her away. But the scar on her arm was another story.
Elizabeth tried to think of who might have noticed the scar on her arm, which she generally kept covered.
Any man she’d slept with might have noticed it. That was not a list she wanted to contemplate, but she knew this was not a time to go easy on herself.
There were a couple drunken hookups in college, but Elizabeth doubted either guy had noticed her arm.
Eamon, her lover in grad school, had asked about the scar. She invented a story about falling into a broken fence when she was a kid, an explanation she’d stuck with since.
She’d sworn off dating for a couple years after Eamon. When she started again, it was with a strict set of rules. It was a given that no relationship could have a future, so she kept it casual. She never dated anyone associated with her work, and she didn’t date anyone for longer than three months. Any man who seemed too curious about her past or the inner workings of her soul didn’t last even that long.
She ran through the list in her head: the environmental lobbyist, the urban planner, the man who managed his family’s landscape business. He’d asked about her arm, and after she told him the story, he wanted to know what kind of fence she’d tangled with.
Elizabeth glanced again at the printout of the website and realized, suddenly, how silly this mining of her romantic past was. The chance that any of those men would have seen this site was astronomically small. No one was going to stumble across it accidentally.
Elizabeth was surprised she hadn’t found the site sooner. It should have come up all the times she’d searched for “Brian Lowry” and “Houston.” Maybe the site was new. How long had it been since she last searched? It was a year at least, maybe longer.
So, she had a site put up in the last year or so devoted to a 20-year-old case, a site that was practically impossible to find unless…
Elizabeth froze.
What if the site was a trap, one designed to snare anyone who searched online for Sharlah Webb? She’d read about the police setting up websites to trap child molesters. Surely they could adapt that tactic to other uses.
Elizabeth quickly folded the papers on the desk and shoved them in her purse. She got up and started to walk toward the hotel exit. Then she forced herself to overrule her panic, to stop and think.
If the website was a trap, what had it just captured? It recorded a hit from a hotel in San Diego and the email address – maybe – of some unsuspecting businessman who was getting ready to board a flight to Phoenix or Des Moines or Raleigh.
It would take time to find him, to ask questions, to search the registered guests, to look at the hotel’s surveillance video.
Elizabeth always suspected her luck would run out someday – no one could escape detection forever. She had dreaded it but also planned for it.
Hidden in her apartment was a stash of cash she’d amassed over the years. She’d lived well below her means since she’d finished grad school.
She would call her boss and plead some kind of emergency, leave the conference and catch the first available flight back to Florida.
Elizabeth headed back toward the check-in desk, hopeful that her room was ready. She had some work to do.
Up in her room, Elizabeth left her suitcase, still packed, standing against the bed and got out her laptop so she could start checking flights.
When she turned it on, the presentation that she’d been working on popped up.
Elizabeth slammed the laptop closed, overwhelmed with guilt.
Suddenly exhausted, she stretched out on the bed, not bothering to kick her shoes off.
She closed her eyes and pondered her options, hoping she’d hit on some magic solution she’d previously overlooked.
She wished there were someone she could run things by, but there was no one.
As Elizabeth, she had things Sharlah could only dream of – an education, a job she loved, enough money to live comfortably.
As far as she’d come, though, some things hadn’t changed: When she faced a big decision, she faced it alone.
Elizabeth felt herself sliding into the warm embrace of self-pity and willed herself to stop.
Opening Door A meant closing Door B. Just because she hadn’t realized she was giving up the chance to share her life with someone, hadn’t realized at 19 that she’d desperately want a baby later, well, that didn’t make it unfair. That was just how life worked. There were tradeoffs.
She would not feel sorry for herself, and she would not shirk her responsibilities.
She would paste on her best smile and go network at the opening reception. She would give her presentation in the morning, and she would knock it out of the damn park.
TEN
Elizabeth was up at 4 a.m. Her body was still on East Coast time, and her mind was stuck in the past.
She’d dreamed about Missy, something that hadn’t happened in years.
In the dream, she was standing outside Missy’s condo staring at Missy’s lifeless form on a stretcher, the body bag unzipped just enough to reveal her bruised face and blood-matted hair.
But then the bag began to rustle, and she realized that Missy was trying to unzip it the rest of the way from the inside.
Elizabeth woke with a start, her heart pounding.
She got out of bed and made herself a cup of weak in-room coffee. She was too awake to go back to bed, but it was too early to think about venturing out.
Elizabeth got out her laptop, thinking she’d give her presentation one final run-through. As soon as she opened it, though, Elizabeth realized that she was sick of it. She’d been through it a dozen times already; more tinkering wasn’t going to accomplish anything and she might even sound bored when the time came to deliver it.
She walked over to the window and pushed the curtains aside, but there wasn’t anything to see. It was still dark out.
She found herself thinking about Missy and wondering about the story behind the newspaper headline she’d spotted before she stumbled on the website that changed everything.
Elizabeth sat down at the desk. There had to be a way to get that newspaper article despite the broken link online, some way that wouldn’t be traced to her.
She had one idea. Unfortunately, it would violate the bright line she
had always drawn keeping her professional life and her past separate. It also involved lying and appropriating someone else’s identity, although Elizabeth had to admit it was probably a little late to be squeamish about that.
She had always believed that whoever killed Missy was the same person who shot her. Wouldn’t that be useful information to have? It might even provide a clue about who was behind the website. She rationalized that a little deception might be OK.
Her mind made up, Elizabeth set about creating a new email identity.
Because she thought it might be the last good thing she ever did for her employer, Elizabeth put everything she had into the presentation.
The audience was sleepy at first, probably still hung over from the opening cocktail reception. People began to perk up after the first few minutes, though, and she got a nice round of applause when she finished.
Several people came to her during the break between sessions asking for more information. She worked through the crowd as quickly as she could without seeming rude, handing out copies of the fact sheet.
Finally, Elizabeth was able to slip away to a pay phone.
She called her boss in Tallahassee first. Elizabeth led with the good news, telling Naomi about the enthusiastic reception for the presentation. Then Elizabeth explained, rather hurriedly, that she had a “personal matter” that required her attention and that she needed to leave the conference early. She would, of course, pay the necessary fees for changing the plane ticket.
Naomi didn’t object, which was fortunate, because Elizabeth had already booked herself on a flight leaving at 1 p.m.
After she talked to Naomi, Elizabeth dialed the number she’d looked up that morning for the newspaper in Houston, and asked for the paper’s reference library.
When she had a librarian on the line, she introduced herself as Leslie Rosen from Florida.
“I’m helping a student track down an article,” Elizabeth began, reciting the speech she’d worked out that morning. “The link online was broken. The headline read ‘SLAIN WOMAN’S MOM LOOKS TO DNA FOR CLOSURE.’ ”
Elizabeth could hear the librarian in Houston typing. This was a simple request, quickly fulfilled, and she was hoping the woman would commit this act of professional courtesy and then quickly forget it.
“I’ve got it,” the woman in Houston said. “Shall I email it to you?”
“That would be great,” Elizabeth said. Then she paused, just as she’d rehearsed. “But the tech geniuses changed our filters and a lot of our attachments aren’t getting through. Why don’t you send it to my personal email? I’d hate to have to bother you again.”
Elizabeth rattled off the email address she’d created just that morning. She thanked the Houston librarian and hung up.
She hoped Les Rosen wouldn’t haunt her for borrowing his name. He’d been her boss once – a sweet man with a sly sense of humor and a whole file of correspondence addressed to “Ms. Leslie Rosen” that he liked to show off.
Her next stop was the bell desk, where she collected the luggage she’d deposited first thing in the morning, after she’d checked out. From there, she went to the reception desk. Just as she’d hoped, the same clerk who’d handled her checkout was working.
“Hello,” she said to the young woman. “I need to get online and print my boarding pass. I already checked out. Can I get some kind of temporary ID and password?”
“The one we gave you at check-in still works,” the clerk said. “They don’t get disabled until after lunch.”
Elizabeth made a show of frowning. “Well, I can’t get it to work. Maybe you could walk over to the business center and help me?” She did her best to appear befuddled by all this newfangled technology.
“I can’t leave the desk,” the clerk said. She scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it to Elizabeth. “Here’s the master ID. It should work.”
“Thanks so much,” Elizabeth said. “You’re a lifesaver.”
In the business center, she got online using the hotel’s untraceable master ID. She accessed the Leslie Rosen email address she’d created that morning and printed out the article from Houston that was waiting there.
The question has haunted Audrey Burke for nearly 20 years: Who killed her daughter?
Police have long maintained that Missy Burke was killed by one of their own – Scott Moreno, a young patrolman caught up in a drug ring with Missy’s boyfriend and a clandestine romantic entanglement with Missy.
Audrey Burke has her doubts. The truth, she believes, is trapped in the fabric of a pair of blue satin panties edged with white lace and a white T-shirt, men’s extra large, emblazoned with the image of a Three Musketeers candy bar.
Elizabeth stopped reading. Scott Moreno? She knew that name, but she couldn’t place it. He wasn’t the cop who’d kept popping up everywhere she went. That cop’s name was Zuk, rhymes with book. She hadn’t forgotten him.
She glanced at her watch and realized she needed to hurry to catch the airport shuttle. Elizabeth stuck the article in her computer bag and walked out of the hotel.
Elizabeth managed to sleep on the last leg of her flight, even though her mind was whirring, trying to process all the information in the article about Missy.
Halfway through the article, she’d remembered Moreno. He’d been one of the two officers at her house after the shooting – Zuk and Moreno.
According to the story, police had linked Moreno to Cliff’s murder using ballistics tests on a gun found at his home. When they started asking around, they found people who had seen Moreno talking to Missy several times at the bar where she worked. From that, they concluded he was the man Missy was seeing on the side.
Missy’s mother didn’t believe her daughter was involved with Moreno; reading between the lines, it was clear she didn’t think Missy would date someone Hispanic. Ever since DNA profiling had become available, she’d been asking the police to test the clothes Missy was wearing when she died.
But Moreno was dead – shot in the head and dumped by a road just a few months after Missy died – and the cops didn’t seem to be in a hurry to verify their theory.
Brian was mentioned in only one sentence. It said that Cliff became involved in running drugs with his buddy Brian Lowry, and that the two of them, along with Brian’s brother, had called themselves the Three Musketeers in high school.
Elizabeth bristled a little, because she thought the story made it seem like Brian got Cliff involved when anyone who knew them knew that Cliff was the schemer, not Brian. Brian was Mr. Go-along-to-get-along.
It was after midnight when Elizabeth wheeled her suitcase into her apartment. She hurriedly unpacked and changed into her pajamas.
Before she could collapse into bed, though, she had one more thing she wanted to do.
After making sure the front door was locked and the deadbolt was on, Elizabeth went to the laundry room off her kitchen.
She nudged the dryer away from the wall and retrieved a metal box wedged into the space behind the washer. Then she locked herself into the bathroom and sat on the floor.
The sight of the money comforted her, as it always did.
The cash was in hundreds, neatly bound with rubber bands. She carefully thumbed through the stacks, counting until she reached $14,800.
Once all the cash was out of the box, all that remained was the gun, wedged in the corner and still wrapped in the same old shirt.
Elizabeth hated the gun, had always hated the gun. It was an unwanted relic of her old, downwardly mobile life, like her bad teeth and country accent.
She’d consciously muted her accent over the years, and 20 months of orthodontia in her early 30s had fixed her teeth, but the gun wasn’t so easily shed.
She’d been carrying it around, moving it from apartment to apartment, but she’d never even unwrapped it. Maybe it was time, finally, to do something about it.
Elizabeth lifted the bundle, taking care to keep the barrel pointed away from her, and unwrapped the
gun.
And just like that, she realized that all the answers were right there. They’d always been right there.
Elizabeth did not approve of all-nighters. She’d found them useless when she was in college, and she always advised students against trying to cram half a semester’s work into one night.
At the moment, though, she was grateful that college students were procrastinators and that the library was open round-the-clock on weekdays to accommodate them.
Sitting on her bathroom floor, realizing how wrong she’d been about everything, she’d come to one overwhelming conclusion: She had to find Brian.
Once she’d resolved to do that, Elizabeth wanted to make up for 20 years of inaction as quickly as possible.
She considered simply sending an email to the link on the website she’d found but rejected the idea as cowardly. If her theory was correct, she was about to detonate a bomb in Brian’s life. She needed to find the most humane way to do it, and email wasn’t it.
A grad student named Chloe was on duty at the library’s main desk, and she did a double take as Elizabeth pushed through the main doors.
Affecting an aura of calm, Elizabeth greeted her. “Good morning, Chloe. How’s it going?”
“Wow, it really is you,” Chloe said. “I didn’t recognize you. The schedule said you weren’t back until Monday.”
Elizabeth always dressed more conservatively than anyone else on the staff, but for the first time ever, she’d come to the library in capris, a T-shirt and flip-flops.
“I’ve been in San Diego and I’m still on Pacific time, I guess,” Elizabeth said.
That was not true. It felt very much like the middle of the night to her, especially because she hadn’t slept well in two days. “I thought I’d get some paperwork done at my desk, see if that puts me to sleep,” she said.
Elizabeth took the stairs up to the staff offices and let herself in. The area was dark. Chloe was the only person on duty at this hour, and she had to stay at the main desk.