Never Come Back

Chapter Thirty-nine

I returned to my food for a few minutes. We both did. Maybe Paul hoped the conversation had run its natural course, that all of the questions I had come armed with as a result of my conversation with Gordon Baxter had been answered. Of course, that wasn’t true. Not by a long shot.

“Damn,” I said. “Mom got pregnant and got married in high school.”

“She did.”

“The girl,” I said.

“What?”

“The girl. Elizabeth. Gordon says she was murdered. Is that true?”

“She ran away. That’s the first thing you need to know,” Paul said. He looked down at his food and jabbed at the salad with more intensity than before.

“Out in the waiting room, you said you thought she was dead. Gordon said the same thing.”

“I’m sure she is,” Paul said, still not looking up. “I’m sure she fell in with the wrong crowd. She was doing drugs. Hard drugs. You can’t expect a life like that to turn out well.”

He sounded cold, dismissive. His voice carried no empathy or understanding for Elizabeth. It didn’t seem like the Paul I knew, and I called him on it.

“Running away,” he said, “is the worst thing you can do to a parent. She put Leslie through hell when she was here, but once she ran away, that was the worst thing of all. To not let your mother know where you are? I can’t imagine.”

“Do you know about the will?” I asked.

He stopped jabbing at his food and looked into my eyes. “You said you had something to tell me. I’m afraid I know what it is.”

“What?” I asked.

He put his fork down and picked up his napkin. First he wiped his mouth, slowly and methodically. Then he balled the napkin up and tossed it onto his tray.

“It’s that crazy woman, that Elizabeth Yarbrough. Are you telling me your mom left her something in the will?”

“A third of the estate,” I said.

Paul closed his eyes. He looked as if he had just been struck by a heavy blow that knocked the wind out of him. “Jesus,” he whispered. “Jesus.”

“You agree with Gordon?” I asked. “You think this woman is a con artist?”

His eyes remained closed. “The alternative is to believe that woman is my niece who’s been missing for thirty-seven years.”

“Why is that hard to believe?” I asked.

He started shaking his head. “I didn’t want to say this to you.”

I waited. I didn’t know whether I wanted to hear anything else from him. But I couldn’t not hear it. That was the problem. After being kept in the dark for so long, I needed to hear everything.

“Say what?” I asked.

He rubbed at his eyes with his knuckles, then opened them, blinking several times. “For several months before… before your mom died,” he said, “I worried about her. About her mental state. I thought she might have been… slipping a little bit.”

“Dementia?”

“Not severe. Not yet. But she might have been heading that way. Did you notice anything?”

“I didn’t—”

But I stopped myself. Who was I to say? I wasn’t speaking to my mother in the weeks before she died.

“I’ve seen this happen to elderly friends of mine,” Paul said. “And their parents. They become susceptible to believing just about anything that they may intensely want to believe. That’s why con artists prey on the elderly. They can’t make the same judgments they once made. They can’t judge character as well.” He tapped his index finger against his temple. “I don’t know when this woman, this Elizabeth Yarbrough, showed up. I’m guessing it was close to a year ago. You know your mom. She wasn’t always eager to reveal anything to anyone until she had to.”

“I know.”

“It was just a few months ago she told me about it. She called me over and told me that she had been reunited with Beth. Her Beth. She was thrilled, of course. Overjoyed. She said they were getting to know each other, and that Beth had apologized for running away. Your mom seemed… happy about it. Relieved, almost. I guess she always thought she was going to die without ever seeing Beth again, without ever knowing what really happened to her.”

“Is that when you saw Beth yourself?” I asked.

Paul’s eyes widened. “I never saw her,” he said. “I’ve never laid eyes on this woman. That’s part of my concern. I started to feel that Leslie was hiding Beth from me. At first, it was under the guise of the two of them just needing to spend time together and get reacquainted. And I could understand that and give them their space. But I think Leslie started to see that I had doubts, and rather than introducing me to Beth and easing those doubts, she kept me away from her. I never met her. When your mom died, it was all a mystery to me.”

“But don’t you think Mom would know her own daughter? Wouldn’t she recognize her?”

“People see what they want to see,” Paul said. “And after thirty-seven years, who can say what anyone would look like? I look at old pictures of myself, and I think I’m seeing a stranger.”

“But there must be some resemblance,” I said. “Something.”

“I wouldn’t know,” he said. “I never saw her. Not even a picture.”

“And you think somehow this woman weaseled her way into Mom’s life and got into the will?” I asked. “How many people even knew Mom had a daughter who disappeared?”

“Everybody who was alive in Haxton in 1975,” Paul said. “I kind of figured it was somebody’s kid or relative, someone who had heard of the case and saw an opening.”

“Maybe it’s even someone who went to school with Beth and knew her,” I said.

“Good point.”

Other things started to click into place. It was true—Mom’s will seemed to have changed suddenly, out of the blue. And then there was the call from a woman to Mr. Allison’s office inquiring about the estate. Who would do that unless they knew they might be getting something—and didn’t want to wait very long to have it? And there was the mystery woman at the other hospital, the one who’d gone to Ronnie’s room to speak with him, leaving him in some kind of unexplained emotional turmoil.

“And Mrs. Porter,” I said.

“Who?”

“Mrs. Porter. You know, Mom’s busybody friend from the library?”

“I know her.”

“She told me Mom came in looking for a book on… I can’t remember it exactly, but it was something about dealing with an adult child who has suffered trauma. Something like that. I had no idea why Mom would be looking for that, but it might make sense if this woman gave her a long sob story about what she’d been through. Right?”

“That’s a sure sign,” Paul said. “Her answer for everything was to go read a book about it.”

“Do the police know about this woman?” I asked.

“I didn’t tell them.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t think… I don’t know who this woman is. I don’t even know if she’s real. It didn’t cross my mind.”

“Jesus, Paul. Do you know what I’m thinking?”

He didn’t say anything, but he nodded his head ever so slightly, as if the movement required a great deal of effort.

“If this woman got into the will, and then Mom ends up dead, doesn’t this make her a suspect?”

“But Ronnie?” Paul said. “What he told the police?”

“You don’t believe that, do you?” I asked. “His confession? Do you really believe that bullshit?”

“He tried to kill himself, Elizabeth. Why else are we here, in this place, except that he couldn’t live with himself for whatever he did?”

I wanted Paul to take a firm stand—and for that firm stand to be on the side I wanted him to be on. But he refused to do so.

It required an effort for me to let it go. I wasn’t going to fight with him again. I wasn’t going to turn against anyone who should be my ally. Instead, I shifted my attention to the tasks I saw ahead of me, the things I needed to take care of.

I needed to contact the police and tell them about the will.

And then I needed to find out all I could about Elizabeth Yarbrough.