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So, I told the two guys I was going to go to the pool.
And there, with my tablet, I began to work.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Betsy
The two detectives had noticed the bruise on her jaw, still fresh and red and the size of a plum. Betsy had told them, hoping her countenance conveyed the right amount of sheepishness, that she had opened a cabinet too fast and done a hell of a job on herself, but she was only aware of it when she spoke—which was a lie. The Advil took the edge off the pain, but it hurt. As did her ribs, where Rory had kicked her. As did her neck. She didn’t believe any of her ribs were broken, but she still experienced jagged stitches of pain when she turned the wrong way or when her arm brushed her side. The cops could see the kitchen from the living room in the small apartment, and she pointed out the door above the dishwasher that she claimed had been the culprit.
“A door,” the female one, Felicia, had said, nodding, and Betsy thought the woman believed her until she asked if she had a boyfriend or girlfriend. When Betsy said no, she had recently broken up with Frankie Limback, she could see in the detective’s eyes that she was filing that bruise away as a cry for help.
If only they could help her…
She’d told them that Frankie would never, ever hurt her, and she’d tried to sound adamant because Rory—her “lawyer”—was watching her with eyes cold as a shark’s.
Some thug had spent the night, wide awake, in the living room. Damon brought him by. He sat by the front door in cargo pants and an Area 51 hoodie stretched tight by his beer keg of a chest. Half his face was hidden by the sort of beard she associated with Civil War generals and white supremacists, the beard and his greasy mane dyed skater-boy blond. They took her cell phone. She hadn’t bothered to have a landline installed yet, but she knew if she had, they would have confiscated that, too.
Rory said little during the interview, but he watched everyone, and he’d looked especially interested when she had revealed to the police that she was now single. She recalled reading somewhere that there was a hand signal that young people who had been abducted and were being trafficked could use to convey to strangers their desperate need for help, but she had no idea what it was. She would have used it when Felicia was studying her—because the woman was studying her, that bruise had been a blinking light—and it frustrated Betsy that she couldn’t remember it. At one point, she considered blurting out to the detectives that Rory was among a group of people who had kidnapped her daughter, but Rory had been clear: Marisa might never come home if she deviated from their agreed-upon script. She didn’t dare risk any sort of small, subtle flare: after the cops left, Rory would still be here, and she knew he might beat her again. And so she told them that she had not been at Red Rocks on Sunday afternoon; it must have been someone else who had been caught on the cameras. On Sunday, she insisted, she had been cleaning the apartment and then had gone to the museum.
“And last night?” the detective pressed.
“Last night I was right here,” she told them. “My daughter did her homework and then the two of us watched some TV. It was a school night.”
“Your sister insists you took her car from the BP parking garage on Sunday and drove out there—to Red Rocks.”
“I did not,” she said. “Never.” That felt good: a hard and fast denial. It gave her a small measure of hope she could get through this. She wanted this over and Marisa back, and then she wanted to hit the road. She wanted to be heading east with the girl as soon as tonight. At least that was her hope and her prayer.
“Tell me about your mother’s death,” Felicia asked, the question out of nowhere.
“Excuse me?” Instantly, the idea of escape vanished from her mind as surely as if it were water sluicing in circles down the drain.
“Your mother.”
“What about her?”
“She died the same way as Yevgeny Orlov. Fell off a cliff. And you were with her. You might have been with Orlov.”
“What are you suggesting? I’m some sort of serial killer and my modus operandi is to push people from high places?”
“Just asking.”
Rory was studying her. They all were.
She’d never told anyone the truth about what happened. It was because she loved her mother and because she loved her sister and because she hated her stepfather. The toxicology report from the autopsy had shown psilocybin in her mother’s blood, and Betsy had indeed given her mother shrooms on their hike. It was to help them enjoy the vista from the top of the ridge: enhance the experience. By then Betsy almost never took magic mushrooms, but it was her mother’s birthday and she had thought it would be fun. She’d never told Crissy, but she and their mother had done shrooms twice before. It wasn’t as big a deal as it would seem. Her mother had enjoyed it, and they really hadn’t experienced anything more than what Betsy viewed as a nice dope high. “THC giggles plus,” her mother called it. The trees hadn’t come to life or the pages in books hadn’t magically started turning. The squirrels hadn’t become dragons.
“The Vermont State Police concluded it was an accident: your mother was either hallucinating because of the chemicals in her system or simply showed bad judgment—because of those chemicals—and walked off the cliff. That was the conclusion. Accidental death.”
Supposedly, the truth will set you free. Wasn’t that the expression? Or the myth? There were limits. Telling the truth about Red Rocks would endanger her daughter. But Vermont was different, and she felt an unexpected craving to come clean now about her mother. She was just so tired and so angry and so scared. She had been unable to sleep last night with that guy guarding her door and her daughter kidnapped. “That is how they ruled it, yes,” she said.
“Is there more to it than that?”
“That’s not what happened. My mother wasn’t hallucinating. Neither of us were. Some people believe she thought she could fly or something ridiculous. But it wasn’t like that.”
“She didn’t try to fly?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. She wondered: was it too late to pull this all back? Rory was leaning forward, and the other detective, Patrick, who had said very little as he scribbled his notes, had stopped writing as if entranced by whatever she was about to reveal. Still, however, she didn’t have to do this. It wasn’t too late.
And yet she wasn’t going to stop. She couldn’t shoulder it—any of it—anymore. Her reinvention here in Las Vegas hadn’t worked because Frankie Limback was cowardly and corrupt, and he had brought her here with a lie. It was over and she was done. Finished.
