I took the file cabinet and found two of the drawers completely empty. Others held files containing warranty information on various household appliances, insurance records, old high school yearbooks, equipment catalogs, and numerous other items that bore no relation to Weston’s work. The only file of interest I found held his military papers. His discharge sheet included the specialist’s training he had received, and there was plenty to list. Weston had certification as a combat diver, airborne specialist, long-range reconnaissance specialist, and demolitions specialist. He was qualified as an expert in both handgun and rifle marksmanship. It was a hell of a résumé. My father had frequently boasted about his Marine Expeditionary Unit training, but it couldn’t touch Weston’s.
“Find anything?” Joe asked, looking over my shoulder.
“Just this.” I handed him the file, and we went through it together. Weston had earned some service ribbons, but there were no details about the missions. That’s how it goes with special operations soldiers. He’d received an honorable discharge.
“Pretty impressive,” Joe said. “But it doesn’t help us much. Nothing worthwhile in the desk, either, unless you need Scotch tape or pencils. This card was on the desk, though. Check out the initials.”
He passed me a plain white envelope with Weston’s address on it. The postmark was from early February, just a few weeks before Weston died. There was no return address. Inside was a simple but elegant piece of stationery with a gold border. Someone had written an inscription with a black fountain pen: “Many thanks on yet another job well done. It had the intended effect.” There was no explanation of what the “it” was, nor what effect the “it” had created. The note was signed with the initials J.E.H.
“Hubbard?” I said.
Joe shrugged. “I have no idea what his middle initial is, but it’s possible. Let’s hang on to the note. Maybe we can check the handwriting out.”
“And if it’s Hubbard’s writing?”
“Then it’s still worthless, but at least we know who to blame.”
We moved on to the next rooms. Joe took the master bedroom, and I went into Elizabeth Weston’s bedroom. It was a bright room with pink walls and lots of stuffed animals. The bedspread had kittens on it. A large plastic dollhouse stood in the corner of the room. Everything about it was happy and innocent. The window looked out on the backyard, and I could see John Weston, still sitting on the picnic table staring at the snowman his granddaughter had made. The sun was out now, and the snowman was glistening as it continued to melt. Weston watched it, and I thought that he could at least have the satisfaction of watching it disappear slowly. To him, that probably meant something right now.
A piece of fishing line was tied to the curtain rod, and from it a small, heart-shaped crystal prism hung in the window, reflecting the sun and distorting the light, bathing the white curtains with rainbows. I took it in my hand and ran my thumb over the chiseled surface, then removed the fishing line from the curtain rod and put it in my pocket. It was a spontaneous decision, and I wasn’t sure what had provoked it. I just wanted to be sure I never forgot this room and this little girl.
I went through the closets and the drawers, moving quickly, pushing past clothing, board games, and toys. I slammed the last drawer shut without finding anything and sat on the edge of the bed, exhaling heavily. I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath. I didn’t want to breathe in this little girl’s room. Maybe, if I didn’t breathe, I could walk back out and tell myself that I’d never been inside, it had never been real, a five-year-old was not missing, her father was not dead.
As I sat on the bed, feeling a weariness that came not from fatigue or stress but from the realization that I lived in a world where children could vanish from happy, innocent rooms like this, I reached out and began to sort through the stuffed animals. There were dozens of them on the floor, ranging from bears to rabbits, with a special emphasis on kittens.
I turned a few of them over, squeezed them, felt their softness, and looked into their unblinking plastic eyes as if they could tell me something. Several of the animals were wearing outfits; some made noises when you squeezed them; others had movable limbs. One scholarly bear was wearing glasses and had a plastic piece of chalk in one paw and a plastic chalkboard tucked under his arm. I pulled the bear closer and saw that the chalkboard was the cover for a small booklet that closed with a snap. I slid the booklet out from where it was tucked under the bear’s paw, opened it, and discovered the little book was a diary. The first entry, in a woman’s writing, read: “Merry Christmas, Betsy! Love, Mom and Dad.”
I flipped through the rest of it. The pages were filled with a child’s drawings and writing. There were quite a few stick figures, lots of hearts, and the name Betsy, all done with various colors of crayon. Every now and then she wrote a few crudely constructed sentences. “Mom made me soop and greeled cheese,” read one entry. There were maybe five or six entries for each month. On every page she’d used, the girl had carefully written the date. Her spelling of “April” was perfect, but “February” had given her fits. I continued turning pages until I reached the last entry. It had been made on March fourth, the day before Weston’s body was found and the search for Betsy Weston and her mother became the city’s hottest news story.
Joe poked his head in the door. “The bedroom was a waste. You got anything worth looking at?”
I didn’t turn around. “They’re alive, Joe.”
“Excuse me?”
“Betsy Weston wrote this in her diary the night she disappeared,” I said.
Joe crossed the room and knelt beside me, then read the diary entry, written in a child’s scrawl with a green crayon: Tonite I said goodby.
CHAPTER 7
“TONIGHT I said goodbye.” Joe read it aloud and then raised his eyes and looked at me. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means she knew she was leaving,” I said.
“That’s a beautiful thought,” he said. “But you don’t have much evidence to base it on.”
“She wrote something, or drew something, every day this year, Joe. On the night she and her mother disappear, she writes this, and you don’t think it means anything?”
He looked at the entry again, then sighed, his eyes thoughtful. “I’m not saying it doesn’t mean anything. I’m just wondering how she possibly could have known to write it. Said goodbye to what? Her house or her dad?”
“Or both,” I said.
“Keep the book,” Joe said. “But don’t let the old man see it. The last thing we want is for him to be any more convinced they’re alive.”
We left the house and checked the garage. A Toyota sport utility vehicle and a Lexus remained, as well as a collection of tools and more toys. Julie Weston and her daughter hadn’t left in one of the family cars. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t have left alive.
We returned to John Weston and gave him the key.
“Find anything helpful?” he asked.
Joe and I exchanged a glance, then Joe said, “Just seeing the home is helpful, Mr. Weston.”
He looked at Joe blankly and didn’t respond. We left, promising to be in touch. When I pulled out of the driveway he was still sitting on the table. I wondered if he’d be there all day.
“Well,” Joe said as I drove, “that wasn’t much help. You think they’re alive now, because of one sentence written in a little girl’s diary. And, while I respect that hunch, it still isn’t any help in finding them.”
“No,” I admitted, “it isn’t.” I pulled onto Brecksville Road and headed north, back toward the city, following roughly the same path the Cuyahoga River takes as it winds its way toward the heart of downtown and into the Flats. The sun was out, and the digital thermometer on the rearview mirror said it was forty-seven degrees outside-not warm enough for me, but the warmest it had been in months. The winter was still clinging to us, refusing to give in to the spring. It had been a long, nasty one, with nearly a hundred inches of snowfall and consistently low temperatures that felt even colder with the frigid winds that whipped in off the lake. Around the first of March it had begun to wear at me. I was annoyed by the lingering traces of snow now, irate at each forecast of another storm, frustrated with the way the cold air squeezed my lungs on every run.