Ink and Bone(56)

“Betty?” said Jones. The woman nodded.

“I just got in from my run,” she said apologetically, pushing a damp fringe of hair away from her eyes. She opened the door, and they walked into a pretty foyer, fresh flowers on the console table by the door. Jones introduced them, and she shook Finley’s hand with a cool but strong grip.

“Eliza loves tulips,” she said, following Finley’s eyes. Eliza, her missing daughter.

Finley nodded and looked into a living room where a fire blazed and a wall-mounted flat screen was on mute, tuned to CNN. The picture of the missing developer was there; the news story was heating up. Cell phone signal dead. No calls out in several days. No credit card usage. No big withdrawals of cash or debt or anything untoward. Car still missing.

“Can I get you anything?” Betty asked.

They both declined and took seats on the couch, with her sitting across in a big wingback chair. On the mantel, piano, and every surface were pictures of a white-blonde, freckled girl and a towheaded boy who was unmistakably her older brother.

Though lovely, there was an emptiness to the space, to the woman. Something gone that had left a dark, cold hollow. Finley felt Betty’s sadness, her anguish leaking into her own heart. It hurt.

“My husband came to take the kids for the day,” she began when Jones prompted her. “They were just going to town to get ice cream, then for a hike. Everything was normal.”

“But you were in a custody battle at the time?” asked Jones.

“Well,” said Betty. “The media made it sound worse than it was. He wanted the kids every other week with him in Manhattan. And I thought that was destabilizing for them, so we were working on it. Would he move here? Would we move back to the city? It wasn’t fun, but it wasn’t necessarily acrimonious. Our marriage had ceased to be a good and healthy thing, but we didn’t hate each other. He wouldn’t have done this. He wasn’t a controller or an abuser. He wouldn’t have taken them, or hurt them.”

Finley watched the woman. She seemed to deflate under the weight of the conversation. Much of the flush was gone from her cheeks. Finley could see her running, pushing her body to the edge of its endurance just for the fatigue that would follow. She didn’t run for her health; she ran to quiet the grief.

“It’s such a cliché,” she said. “The police assumed from the beginning that it was him, and I’m not sure that they ever looked for any other possibility.”

Jones made a noncommittal but affirming noise, and Betty turned subtly toward him.

“When the other girl—Abbey Gleason—went missing, they started to wonder if they missed something. But then they picked that family apart, too.”

Again, Jones gave a sympathetic nod. He wouldn’t trash the police work that was done, even if he didn’t agree with the way the investigation had been conducted. That wasn’t his way. Jones Cooper kept his opinions to himself.

“They reopened the investigation at that time,” Betty said. Finley noticed then a kind of flat, glassy quality to the woman’s eyes. She was on meds of some kind, understandably.

“You moved here about a year before their disappearance?” Jones asked. “Is that right?”

She nodded. “You know, the city is so expensive, we could give the kids a better life—all that.”

“What drew you to The Hollows?” Finley asked. They had that in common, the Gleasons and the Fitzpatricks—they were outsiders, come to The Hollows from elsewhere.

“My family is from here,” she said. “My maternal grandmother Hester Briar was born here. I never knew her, but I remembered visiting the town when I was a kid. When Jed and I were looking for a place to live, we came here and fell in love with it. I felt like I instantly belonged. Jed—not so much. I think it was one of the things that pushed us over the brink to divorce.”

There was a kind of ripple in Finley’s perception. And then the little girl appeared at her mother’s feet, brushing the hair of a Barbie doll. The boy was over by the television, holding a video game controller in his hand, tapping it violently and jerking his body side-to-side like he was driving a racecar. Then they were gone.

Finley looked at the Xbox, cords wrapped and stowed on a tidy shelf next to a stack of game sleeves. There were books in a basket under the coffee table, and a small wicker toy box in the corner. It was a room waiting for children.

“Do you mind an odd question?” asked Finley. She felt the heat of Jones’s eyes on her. But Betty smiled sadly and shook her head, as if there was no question that hadn’t already been asked of her.

“Did either of your children ever experience prophetic dreams? Or maybe play with imaginary friends? See people who weren’t there?”

Betty leaned back in her chair and looked up at the ceiling as if trying to retrieve the answer.

“Well, Eliza has a wild imagination,” she said. “She’s always making up stories, creating cartoon characters. I wouldn’t say she had prophetic dreams. But now that you mention it, there was an imaginary friend for a while after we moved here. We didn’t think much of it. Just her way of adjusting to a new life, missing her old friends and teachers.”

Betty’s eyes drifted over to one of the pictures of the kids on the mantle.

“Joshua, on the other hand, is all about math and science,” she said. “Not even much of a reader. He has an engineer’s mind, just like his dad. No imaginary friends for him.”