The Butterfly Sister (8 page)

As if on cue, the stove flame singed the wet bottom of the teakettle and let out a startling hiss. Mrs. Richards hurried to the stove. Silence filled the room while she tended the teapot and I looked through the assorted tea bags in the canister on the table. I selected something herbal, cinnamon apple, and set the bag down in front of me as soon as she started talking again.

“And the police . . . I don't understand. Have they checked the hospitals? Beth wasn't feeling well before she left. She'd been fatigued and lethargic. She didn't have much of an appetite. Maybe she fainted in the airport bathroom and hit her head and has amnesia. And she's just sitting in some hospital bed in Pittsburgh, staring out the window, not knowing who she is.”

As Mrs. Richards poured hot water into two mugs on the counter, I looked at the contents of the table and wall once more. There was a timeline, including exact times for every Internet search Mrs. Richards had conducted over the course of four days, and every phone call. I found my name there under Sunday @ 6:15
P.M.
It was misspelled “Ruby Russo,” with the added detail, “Friend from Tarble, has Beth's suitcase,” in black pen and another note in red pen, perhaps an afterthought, “Sounded genuine. Not a suspect.”

I turned my eyes from the wall when Mrs. Richards approached the table with our mugs. Each boasted its own silver stirring spoon.

“What do
you
think?” she asked, selecting the same herbal tea I did from the jar. “How did my daughter vanish into thin air?”

I stalled by dipping my tea bag into the mug several times; it was piping hot, and I burned my finger. “Mrs. Richards . . .”

“—You can call me Janice,” she said.

“Okay. Janice. I don't think it's my place to hypothesize.”

“You can be honest.”

I shrugged and wondered if Detective Pickens had shared his missing persons statistics with Beth's mother, if she knew the odds were against her.

“A mother should know, shouldn't she?” Janice went on. “If her own child is dead? I would know. And I just don't believe . . . I feel her, Ruby. Here.” She placed her palm flat on her chest.

I remembered how I'd felt the evening prior, reading Beth's book in its entirety, looking for more clues about Mark. I'd felt Beth, even heard her voice, as if she was speaking to me not beyond the grave but perhaps just before it.

“Then trust your instincts,” I told Janice.

Beth's mother clutched her mug like a teddy bear and stared into her tea. She looked so lonely.

“Do you have other children?” I asked.

She shook her head. “It's just Beth and me. Ken—my husband, Beth's father—passed a long time ago. Beth was seven. She was devastated. You know how little girls are with their daddies.”

I did know, and yet I would have said I knew better how little girls were
without
their daddies. I told Janice then about my own father's unexpected death, and that I too was an only child.

“I never knew we had so much in common,” I said, suddenly reminded of why I'd come to visit Janice in the first place. Did Beth and I have more in common than family dynamics? I wondered. Had we both been in love with the same man?

“Did Beth keep in touch with many girls from Tarble over the summer?” I asked, playing with the tea bag in my cup. I sensed Janice had met an emotional threshold on the subject of her daughter's disappearance and would be up to changing the subject, a subject I so desperately wanted to indulge.

“Sure. She went there to visit some friends taking summer session.”

I dropped the tea bag. “Do you remember any of these girls' names?”

“One of them works for the college. Heidi. She was in your class.”

Heidi Callahan. I'd thought my former best friend—the only Heidi in our class—was back home in Minneapolis. And yet all summer, she'd apparently been at Tarble, working for the college after graduation. But Heidi and Beth had never been friends; they were acquaintances, just like Beth and me. Was it possible they'd become friends after I dropped out?

“How often did Beth go?” I asked.

“Almost every weekend.”

“She went for the day?”

“Sometimes she stayed overnight, even though we live so close. It was fun for her, I think, staying in the dorms. Like she never graduated.” Janice set her mug down on the table then with a thud, as if she'd reached a conclusion. “Ruby, I see where you're going with this. And I think you're right.”

I stared back at her in confusion. There was no way she knew my ulterior motive. “I am?”

“We need to tell people at Tarble about Beth.”

“Oh. Right. We do.”

“The detective talked to some students and professors at the med school, but I don't think he has talked to anyone from Tarble. Except you. And there might be someone who knows something.”

Could it be Mark? I wondered. Was he the
someone
who knew
something
? Had Beth really been visiting Heidi Callahan all summer? Or was that just the excuse Beth gave her mother so she could spend weekends with Mark?

“When was the last time she went to Tarble?” I asked.

“I think it was the beginning of September. She's been home every weekend since.”

“Why did she stop going?”

“School started. Too busy, I guess. Plus, like I told you, she wasn't feeling her best.” Janice set her mug down again. “You know, I've been meaning to call Sarah to tell her. But I don't have her phone number.”

“You mean Beth's roommate? Sarah Iverson?”

Janice nodded.

“She doesn't know Beth is missing?”

“I wanted to call her, see if she'd heard from Beth, but the detective told me to wait. Like I said before, wait for what?”

I didn't understand why Detective Pickens was keeping a tight lid on Beth's disappearance, why he wasn't interested in Beth's past friends or relationships at Tarble. He had a hidden motive, perhaps. And I had mine. By that point, Beth's book was burning a hole through my purse, and I needed to find a nonchalant way of introducing the topic to Janice.

I remembered the postcard tucked inside the book.

“Did you know Tarble's Reunion is this weekend?” I asked, finally removing the bag from my tea. It had grown bitter from being steeped too long. “Did Beth mention it?”

Just then, the phone rang, and Janice ran out of the room to answer it. “I don't let any call go to the answering machine,” she explained.

I finished my last sip of tea before picking up a stack of photos from the table. I saw Beth at age six, wearing a pink tutu. Beth at age twelve, in a ski parka and glasses. Beth at sixteen in an aquamarine evening dress, posed in front of a fireplace beside a boy with a matching cumberbund and bow tie. Janice must have collected the snapshots in the past few days, trying to scrounge up the memory of her daughter, physical evidence that she existed, and still exists. I started thinking that if Beth was dead—I wanted to believe she was alive—but if she was dead, if she never came home, these photos would be all she had left. And it was then I decided not to show
A Room of One's Own
to Janice. I would not dare introduce the idea that Beth might have had an affair with a married man. I wasn't going to be the one to destroy Beth's reputation with her mother. It wouldn't be fair. After all, my own mother did not know about Mark.

I peeked around the corner of the kitchen then and saw Janice had taken the phone to a four-season room at the rear of the house, perhaps for privacy. I figured it was the only chance I'd get to return Beth's book to its rightful place, and I took it.

I found Beth's bedroom door partially ajar at the end of the hall and pushed it open, forcefully, because it stuck on the thick carpet. Once inside, I felt the urge to snoop, to peek into the life of this girl I had not truly known. But I feared Janice would somehow know I'd intruded. Instead, I let my eyes examine the space. Beyond the neatly made twin bed, recently dusted dresser, and clutter-free desk, the room served as an exhibit of sorts for this budding photographer. Pictures—some portraits, some landscapes, some abstract—covered every available inch of wall space. Some were displayed in formal frames behind glass; others hung nonchalantly off metal clips resembling wooden clothes hangers.

Along the far wall, a collection of photographs caught my eye, each an artistic-angled snapshot of the Tarble College campus. Beth's subject choice startled me. Far from being commercial or brochure worthy, the pictures captured the day-to-day happenings of campus life with the keen eye of a student. A sunlit staircase in Langley Hall. The sun rising over Lake Michigan. A tree losing its leaves in front of the student center. The little red bridge over the creek at the edge of campus.

The red bridge. It had been Mark's favorite spot to meet up, conveniently on campus but private. I'd walk there and wait for him—sometimes feeding bread to the ducks swimming below, sometimes just taking in the tree-lined view of Frieburg Chapel. Coincidentally, Beth's picture, taken in late fall, captured my exact perspective the very last time I'd stood on that bridge waiting for Mark. Bare tree branches. A muddy gray sky.

I released the photo from the metal-and-wire hanger to get a closer look, disregarding my earlier decision not to touch anything. Immediately, I heard a
whoosh
sound echo off the wall, followed by a crisp tap on the baseboard. It was another picture, one Beth had concealed behind the photo of the bridge. Two faces stared back at me as I reached to pick it up. Beth and Mark. Together. Smiling. His arm around her. Her head resting slightly on his shoulder. It was a close-up, the background fuzzy. But I guessed the photo had been taken at some sort of play or musical performance. In the distance, I made out a few men in suits and a woman wearing an old-fashioned wide-brimmed hat and draped scarf, obviously one of the performers interacting with the audience in the lobby after the show.

“You know the problem with photographs,” Mark had said to me once, when I tried to take our picture, my arm extended as far away as possible to snap a good shot. “They're like diaries. Incriminating.”

As my cheeks flushed with jealousy, I heard footsteps in the hallway and instinctually tucked the photo into my purse, between the pages of
A Room of One's Own,
to keep it from being bent. It was officially the second personal belonging I'd stolen from Beth Richards.

I turned in time to see Janice in the doorway and prepared to explain why I was in Beth's bedroom without her. Janice did not look angry, though. All the color in her cheeks had faded to gray. Her eyes had turned glassy.

Palms open, she held the cordless phone out to me, as if it were covered in blood.

“The detective said Beth fits a profile,” was all she said.

“A profile?” I asked. “Of what?”

Janice dropped the phone. “The victim of a serial killer.”

W
aiting to talk to Detective Pickens, I sat in the Milwaukee Police Department corridor and tried to erase the images from my mind—of Beth's hands bound with rope, her mouth gagged, her pale white body floating facedown in a river, a dirty finger-nailed man approaching her from behind—but they replayed like scenes from
Law & Order
. And the words came:
Beth Richards, 22, of Milwaukee, died October 8—

Fortunately, Detective Pickens maneuvered through the heavy steel door and interrupted Beth's obituary middraft. “Ms. Rousseau?”

I jumped to my feet. “You startled me.”

“You've succeeded in surprising me as well. What can I do for you? Or did you drive two hours just to say hello?”

“I was at Janice's house when you called,” I explained.

Truth was, I hadn't had time to return Beth's book to its proper place in her room. And I certainly wasn't going to bring it up to Janice after she told me about the serial killer. My only option—once Janice's sister, Susan, arrived to relieve me of my
sitting with Janice
duties—was to deliver the book to a more objective party.

Detective Pickens, unfortunately, was that person.

He lurched his head toward the door. “To my office,” he said.

I followed him into a white hallway that seemed brighter than the midday sun. We walked in silence, down one hallway and then another, passing black steel doors fitted with square heavy paned glass windows. In one room, a man sat with his head in his hands. Was he a witness or a suspect? I wondered.

In his office, Detective Pickens offered me a chair covered in soiled, orange pleather. I sat, but only on the front half of the seat, not wanting to get too comfortable, if that was even possible. Meanwhile, he crammed his body into his desk chair and moved a stack of manila folders to another spot on his messy desk. I watched him rub the rolls of fat on the back of his neck.

“How much do you know?” he asked.

“Beth fits a profile?”

Another sigh. “The Pittsburgh PD is staking out a suspect this very moment. Beth is his type. He likes them young, tall, and pretty, okay? Blond hair. The others also went missing from PIT. One a year ago, another about six months ago. In other words, he was due to strike again. We have him profiled. Everything fits, even the time frame.”

I conjured images of the Boston Strangler, Son of Sam, and Ted Bundy. “What happened to the other girls?” I asked. “The ones who went missing from the Pittsburgh airport?”

“Found them dead. Raped, stabbed, dumped in a body of water.”

Raped. Stabbed. Dumped. I imagined Beth's white arm, a gold bracelet dangling from her delicate wrist, buried in a clump of muddy weeds.

“Without a body or an arrest at the moment, we're refraining from breaking this to the news.” He shook his fat finger in my face. “So no talking to your colleagues at the
Chronicle,
okay?”