Never Come Back

Chapter Forty-one

I remained in the car for a few minutes longer. The weather had been milder than everyone had expected, and people had emerged from their homes, blinking in the sunlight, deciding that they’d better hurry up and enjoy it because it might be the last day like that for a long, long time.

I cracked the window, letting in a little air. I called Detective Richland. It was late on Saturday afternoon, and I had no idea whether the detective would still be on duty after the events of the morning. He didn’t answer his phone, so I left a message explaining that I had new information about my mother’s case and to please call. I called and left a message for Detective Post as well, under the assumption that she would be more likely to call me back than Richland.

I started the car and headed for downtown.

If the Internet didn’t have the answers I wanted, I knew a place that might. The Dover Public Library sat two blocks off the courthouse square downtown. It was a boxy limestone building with small windows and heavy doors. It looked like a place constructed to withstand a siege.

I mounted the front steps and went into the dark, silent space. I loved being inside the library. Mom and Dad had brought us there all the time when we were kids. I’d been to libraries in other towns, and I liked the Dover one best. I applied the same theory to libraries that I did to churches. I didn’t want them to look modern and bright and welcoming. I was more comfortable in them when they were heavy and foreboding.

I hadn’t been to the periodicals room in years. I used to go there when I was a teenager and read music magazines, thinking to myself that I would run off someplace where all those cool bands hung out and played: Austin, London, Los Angeles. I hadn’t run off, of course, but I did associate the library with the freedom to dream.

As the fates would have it, a friendly face waited for me in the periodicals room. Mrs. Porter stood behind the counter. She held a paperback novel in her right hand, her eyes glued to the pages. She didn’t see me right away. But as I approached the desk, she looked up and greeted me with a big smile. She marked her place with a piece of paper and put the book aside.

“Well, well,” she said. “Elizabeth. To what do we owe this honor?”

“I’m here to do research, I guess.”

“Is this for school?” she asked. “You know, I don’t ordinarily staff the periodicals desk. The woman who normally works here, her daughter had a baby so she went to Cincinnati to help out. I’m just filling in.”

“I’m looking for newspapers,” I said.

“They’re all right there,” she said, pointing. “Local, state, and national. Although how anyone can read the New York Times I’ll never understand. Too liberal for my tastes.”

“Do you carry the newspaper from Haxton?” I asked.

Mrs. Porter scrunched up her face. “Oh, honey. The Haxton Herald-Leader ceased publication five years ago. Nothing ever happens in Haxton.”

“I’m looking for old papers,” I said. “From, say, the seventies. Do you have those on microfilm?”

“Oh, those. See those big things over there?” She pointed to a large filing cabinet with elongated drawers. “They’re all in there, chronological by date. See, I do know something.” She winked at me. “Say, didn’t your mother grow up in Haxton? I think she mentioned that once.”

“She did,” I said.

Mrs. Porter looked suspicious. “So this isn’t a school project, I gather?”

I shook my head. “Actually, Mrs. Porter, I was wondering if I could ask you something about my mother. Something strange.”

Mrs. Porter’s eyebrows rose halfway up her forehead when I said the word “strange.”

“You can ask me anything,” she said, barely concealing her anticipation.

I almost didn’t say it. I knew how rumors and stories could spread in a town like Dover, and Mrs. Porter had to be at the white-hot center of the gossip wildfire. But I needed to find out whether she knew anything.

“Did my mom ever mention anything to you about being married before she was married to my dad?” I asked.

If you looked up the definition of “taken aback” in the dictionary, you would probably find the look Mrs. Porter showed on her face. The corners of her mouth turned down in an exaggerated frown. She appeared almost offended.

“I never heard any such thing,” she said.

I worried that I had crossed a line, that Mrs. Porter would see my question as unseemly and somehow besmirching the memory of someone recently deceased. I couldn’t necessarily blame her.

But then she leaned forward, placing both her elbows on the counter. She brought her face close to mine and spoke in a low voice. “Is that true?” she asked.

I kept my voice low as well, entering into the conspiracy with her. “I think it is.”

“Are you researching marriage records?” Mrs. Porter asked.

“Something like that,” I said.

“Well,” she said, the single word an expression of surprise and also some kind of judgment. “People do surprise you.”

“Indeed they do.”

“But Leslie Hampton? I guess she’s the last person I would expect to surprise me. That woman was as steady as a rock.”

“I agree. Well, I’m going to get to work over here.”

“Elizabeth? Did you ever figure out why your mother wanted that book she was in here looking for?”

“No,” I said. “I’m still figuring that one out.”

Mrs. Porter looked at me suspiciously.

“Heck,” I said, “maybe after all those years of reading about Ronnie, she decided she really needed a book to figure me out.”

Mrs. Porter didn’t laugh. “Your mother was very proud of you,” she said. “She talked about it all the time.”

I hadn’t expected those words, nor did I expect my response. I felt tears welling in my eyes. I don’t know whether Mrs. Porter noticed or not, but I turned away as fast as I could and headed for the microfilm drawers.

The task of making sense of the microfilm filing system gave me time to collect myself again. I blinked the tears away as I went through the drawers that held the Haxton Herald-Leader. It took a few minutes to work my way down the length of the filing cabinet. Then I had to run through the dates until I came across the right time frame. I found 1975, but that didn’t narrow things down much. A daily newspaper left me 365 days to choose from.

Then I remembered what Gordon Baxter had said about Beth. She had just started her sophomore year of high school. So I decided to begin with the microfilm for the month of September.

I threaded the strip through the machine, turned the viewing light on, and began. I immediately felt overwhelmed by the impossibility of the task. I wasn’t even sure what I hoped to find.

The front pages of the daily editions of the Haxton Herald-Leader scrolled by, making me dizzy. I worried important information would fly by without my noticing. In the first few minutes, only key words jumped out. “School tax levy” went by a lot. “President Ford” passed a few times. The high school football team, the Haxton Raiders, was apparently off to a good start. I stopped on a few photos, all in black and white. The men wore checked sport coats and wide ties. Most of the women had long straight hair, usually parted in the middle. It didn’t look like just another time; it looked like another planet. Did I really have a sibling who grew up in that world?

I approached the end of the month. Twenty-third, twenty-fourth, twenty-fifth. Maybe I missed it. Or maybe I just needed to keep looking further through the year.

Had anything happened the way people had been telling me?

Both Paul and Gordon Baxter had told me—emphatically—that this Elizabeth Yarbrough woman was a con artist. But was Gordon Baxter one as well? Paul called Gordon a criminal and said he’d been in jail. Were Gordon and Elizabeth working together? The large withdrawals from Mom’s bank account, the appearance of Elizabeth in the will… Was Paul right? Had Mom lost her sharpness and been taken advantage of? Had they played on her intense desire to see her daughter again?

Then something caught my eye. I scrolled past it accidentally since my hand seemed to be moving faster than my brain. I rewound until I saw the page I wanted again.

There it was. A headline read, “Local Teen Missing for Three Days.”

Three days? Did it really take three days for something like this to become a news story?

There were no pictures, just a story I skimmed through. It repeated the same fundamental details Gordon Baxter had told me in McDonald’s. “Fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Baxter went missing from her home… a sophomore at Haxton Senior High… no information about her whereabouts… police aren’t sure whether to call her absence a crime yet.”

What had the police known that they weren’t saying? At that point they would have already talked to Mom and Gordon Baxter. The police would have known about the troubles they were having with Elizabeth. Gordon specifically said they’d mentioned the drugs to the police. How hard were they really looking for her?

I skipped ahead to the next day. No story. And the same for the two days after that. September was over at that point. I reached down and brought out the roll of film for October, switched the reels, and started looking again. On October 1 a longer story ran—and for the first time, I saw a picture of my half sister, Elizabeth.

She looked just like my mother. If I hadn’t known my sister existed, I would have thought it was a portrait of my mother taken when she was a teenager. They shared the same eye and nose shape, the same high forehead. I didn’t know—or care—what Gordon Baxter contributed to the young woman. I saw only my mother. And, yes, even pieces of me. I lifted my hand and brought it to the screen. I touched the image gently, as though I expected some emanation to come through, some information that would explain everything that was going on. But of course it didn’t.

I leaned back a little and read the story. The police reiterated that they weren’t ready to call the missing girl the victim of a crime. In fact, this story reported that the girl’s father, Gordon Baxter, had informed them that the girl was “troubled” and “high-spirited.”

High-spirited? I knew what that meant. It was code for “strong-willed girl.” Not only could Gordon not control his daughter, he couldn’t even begin to understand her. So he labeled her a troublemaker in the newspaper, for all to see. The article ended with Gordon saying, “She started to run with a bad crowd. Maybe she just didn’t want to be here anymore.”

So the consensus had been reached even back then, from her father—Mom wasn’t quoted in the article—as well as the police: Elizabeth Baxter had run away. But Gordon insisted to me that she had been killed, probably by some serial killer the state had put to death. I remembered the name: Rodney Ray Brown.

I took out my phone and searched the Web. I entered “Rodney Ray Brown” along with “Elizabeth Baxter.” Just a few hits came up. One of them was from a Web site devoted to serial killers. A small note at the end of the entry on Brown mentioned that he was suspected in more killings, and it listed Elizabeth’s name as one of the possibilities. Beyond that, little seemed to tie the two together. Brown had killed in Ohio and Indiana during the 1970s. Elizabeth had run off in Ohio during the 1970s. That was about it.

“Who’s that?”

I jumped. Mrs. Porter had managed to sneak up on me and was looking over my shoulder. I reached for the on/off switch.

“Is that your mother?” she asked.

“It’s—”

I don’t know how bad her eyesight was, or whether she just didn’t look closely enough to see the headline, but she patted me on the shoulder and said, “It’s amazing how much you two look alike.”