Cry Mercy (11 page)

“In case you were wondering, I've commandeered your adorable child,” Susanna told Emme. “She's been a great help to me, separating colored index cards.”

“I made …” Chloe paused to count. “Four piles. Blue ones, yellow ones, white ones, and pink ones.”

“Four very neat piles, I might add,” Susanna noted.
“Maybe one day next week you can help me organize my pencils.”

Chloe draped herself across her mother's lap and nodded solemnly.

“Really, Susanna, you don't have to—” Emme began.

“It's a pleasure to have her company,” Susanna told her as she stepped backward toward the hall. “Chloe, unless I misunderstood, I think Trula has something in the kitchen she wanted you to see.”

“What is it?” Chloe's head shot up.

“Let's go find out.” Susanna beckoned to her, and Chloe was out the door in a flash. “I'll see you both on Monday. Have a good weekend.”

“Have anything special planned, Susanna?” Mallory asked.

“Not much.” Susanna smiled and followed Chloe. “You, know, just the usual.”

“What's the usual?” Emme asked as Susanna's footsteps faded down the hall.

“No one knows. She leaves at the same time almost every Friday and isn't seen or heard from until Monday morning, but she never says where she goes or what she does.”

“Maybe she doesn't do anything. Maybe she stays home and reads. Or paints. Or … something.”

“Uh-uh.” Mallory shook her head. “She goes
somewhere
. Charlie and I were on our way to Gettysburg one weekend and we were behind her in traffic all the way to the cutoff for the turnpike entrance.”

“Maybe she was visiting family.”

“She says she doesn't have any.”

“That could be true. A lot of people have no family.”
Like me
, she could have added.

“We—Trula and I—think she's seeing someone.”

Emme looked confused. “But I thought she and Robert—”

“I thought that at first, too. There's just some sort of buzz—some sort of electricity—between them.”

“Definitely. I assumed they were an item.”

“Trula says no. That Robert will never look at another woman as long as he doesn't know whether Beth is dead or alive.”

“Wouldn't she have contacted him by now if she was alive?” Emme's brows knit into a frown.

“One would think.” Mallory nodded. “But I think Robert still needs to believe she's out there somewhere and there's a reason why she can't contact him. Amnesia, something like that, maybe. I think it's easier than facing the probability that she and Ian are dead. I think he could accept the truth. He just doesn't know what the truth is.”

“Meanwhile, there's Susanna,” Emme said thought fully.

“Yeah. There's Susanna, and that buzz…”

Over her morning coffee, served with a smile from the same waitress who waited on her many a Saturday morning at the old-fashioned diner just east of Pittsburgh, Susanna studied the state map. Roads she'd already traveled were highlighted in green. It was somewhat disheartening to acknowledge that the green lines transversed half of western Pennsylvania and wove through the mountains like the twisted web
of an enormous spider. Her challenge this weekend was to travel the next few miles that Beth Magellan could have taken. There were many possibilities to choose from, many roads through, over, or around the mountains.

Where did you go, Beth? Where did you turn off the highway? Where did your detour take you?

Questions she'd been asking for two years. Where were Beth and Ian?

Until she knew—until Robert knew—Susanna's life would remain trapped in the same limbo as his.

Law enforcement from many agencies—the local and state police along with the FBI—had searched the entire width of the state, from Gibson Springs, where Beth had attended a baby shower at the home of her sister, to Conroy, without success. Search parties had scoured the mountains and valleys of western Pennsylvania for weeks following the disappearance of Robert's wife and child, Susanna reminded herself. Did she really think she, alone and unassisted, could find what they had failed to find? She wasn't sure.

All she knew for certain was that Robert would never move on until he knew Beth wasn't coming back. And while Susanna could admire that sort of loyalty—if she were the missing wife, she'd surely cherish such devotion—the simple fact remained that she'd been in love with Robert Magellan since she met him all those years ago and he'd hired her as his administrative assistant.

They'd worked closely together, and Susanna had come to know him well—his faults as well as his virtues. She held out the hope that someday he'd look at her in
that
way, even after he'd met the beautiful
Beth Tillotson and it became apparent that he was falling in love. Somehow, even after Beth and Robert had married, Susanna hadn't been able to sever herself from him. She was one of his best friends, he'd told her one day when she'd tried to hand in her resignation. He and a partner, Colin Bressler, were starting up a new company—an Internet search engine they were calling Magellan Express—and he needed her to help set up the company. No one had better organizational skills than she did, and there was no one he'd trust more to get the new venture up and running. So she'd stayed through the years, through his marriage and the birth of his son, through the nightmare of the past two years.

She couldn't remember the exact moment when it occurred to her that if they were ever to be together, she was going to have to take matters into her own hands. She knew that in the months following the disappearance of his family, Robert had contemplated taking his own life many times. She knew, too, that only the possibility that they might be found kept him from going through with it. She'd been the one who'd pointed out to him how furious Beth would be if she came back and found out that he'd given up.

The only way to save him—and maybe herself as well—was to find Beth and Ian.

Susanna had studied every topographic map she could get her hands on, and was by now familiar with the terrain. The Appalachian Mountains ran through Pennsylvania in a series of highs and lows that stretched in every direction, and the turnpike was built over, through, and around the mountains. It had been established that upon leaving her sister Pam's home
late Sunday morning, Beth had gotten on the turnpike. Right after the first exit she came to, however, a tractor-trailer had jackknifed on ice, and the state police had shut down the road. As a consequence, all traffic was diverted off the turnpike to one of the feeder roads. It was suspected that all of the detour signs had not been in place when Beth pulled off the toll road, and she might have had to depend on her own sense of direction to get around the accident site and back to the turnpike. The police had combed the hills and mountains and ravines closest to the main road for miles, but there'd been no sign of the car Beth had been driving that day.

In one of those odd twists of fate, Beth's new car, with its GPS system, had been blocked in her sister's driveway by her brother-in-law—he'd left with a friend early that morning to play golf. Impatient to get home, Beth had borrowed an old Jeep from Pam, one without a tracking system. In her haste, Beth had left her cell phone hooked up to the charger in her own car. At the time, the newspapers had made much of the fact that Robert Magellan's wife may very well have been found had she had the benefit of any of the modern technology through which her husband had made his fortune.

With a pencil, Susanna traced the route she would take today. Satisfied with her agenda, she wondered if this would be the day she'd come across that shred of evidence that others had missed, if today would be the day she'd help to set Robert free. Not that she wished Beth and Ian harm, but she was clearheaded enough to have analyzed the situation objectively and had come to the only rational conclusion. If Beth had
run away—left her husband for another man, say—surely she would have accessed her own bank accounts, or used her credit cards. If Beth and Ian had been kidnapped, there'd have been ransom demands. If they'd merely gotten lost, Beth eventually would have stopped somewhere along the way and called for help. If they'd been in a nonfatal accident, they'd have ended up in a hospital.

Susanna had known Beth well enough to know she'd have slit her wrists before she'd leave Robert without first securing a very comfortable financial cushion, but none of her accounts had been touched. There'd been no contact from kidnappers, and no calls for help. Hospitals from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia had been contacted, but there'd been no patients with amnesia matching Beth's description.

To Susanna's mind, absent any of the alternatives, there was one explanation for their disappearance. Having traveled many of the mountain roads, she could see how easily a Jeep could go off one of those hairpin curves and straight down the mountainside into a ravine without being noticed. There'd been many times when she'd been the only car on the road for several miles. On a Sunday, there was even less traffic. If Beth had become confused, it would have been easy enough for her to get lost. As the roads wound around the mountain, one into the next, she could have gotten turned around in any one of a number of places. Beth had been impatient and impetuous and had unflagging confidence in her own ability to do anything. It was no stretch for Susanna to imagine Beth's certainty that she'd find her way on her own. Add that to unfamiliar roads that had reportedly
been icy that morning, and you had the very real possibility that the Jeep had gone over the side at some point, and was still waiting to be found.

Susanna was determined to be the one to find that Jeep, and when she did, Robert would finally be free to move on with his life. Whether he chose to take Susanna with him, well, that remained to be seen. But at least he'd have the truth, and Susanna would be the one who'd found it for him, regardless of what it might cost her in the long run.

She paid for her breakfast and set off on her journey.

W
e're going to find a new house today,” Chloe sang as she climbed onto the bench seat at the restaurant in the lobby of the hotel where they'd been staying since their arrival in Conroy earlier in the week.

“I don't know if we'll find one, but we are going to look.” Emme turned to the waitress who approached with a coffeepot in one hand and a booster seat in the other. “Good morning, Marjorie. I think we're going with the same old, same old this morning. Unless Chloe wants pancakes instead of waffles.”

“Waffles.” Chloe nodded as Marjorie slid the booster across the seat for her. “And bacon. And juice.”

“Okeydokey.” Marjorie poured coffee into Emme's cup then wrote the order down. “Mom?”

“Just coffee for me, thanks.”

“I'll be back in a jif.”

“She always says that, every day.” Chloe wiggled into the seat. “‘I'll be back in a jif.’”

“She means she'll be back very soon.” Emme fixed her coffee and took a sip. “Jif is short for
jiffy.”

“I thought that.” Chloe nodded and rested her elbows on the table. “Will our new house be big?”

“I don't know. I don't think so. I don't think we need a very big house just for the two of us, do you?”

“But we would for us and a dog.”

“We don't have a dog, sweet pea.”

“We could have a dog if we had a house. With a yard.”

“We'll see what houses the Realtor has to show us today. It may take us a while to find something we like, you know.”

“But we
could
find something we like today.”

“Yes, we could. And in the meantime, we have our nice room upstairs here, and we have Marjorie to be our waitress every morning for breakfast.”

“We're going to look for a new house today,” Chloe told Marjorie as their juice was served.

“You are?” Marjorie wiped up a tiny spill. “Well, I'd certainly miss seeing you every morning, Miss Chloe.”

Inside Emme's bag, her phone began to ring. She retrieved it and held it to one ear and used one hand to cover the other ear to block out the ongoing conversation between her daughter and the waitress.

“Emme? Nick Perone.” Without giving her a chance to return the greeting, he plowed on. “As you suggested, I went through those boxes of Belinda's that the sorority housemother sent a few months ago.”

Emme sat up straight, her interest immediately piqued.

“I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you found something you thought I should know about.”

“If you think the call records from Belinda's old cell phone are something you'd like to know about, then, yeah, I did.”

“I thought the police already had the records for her cell phone.”

“They have the records for the phone she'd been using this year. But she'd gotten a new one last summer. Different model, different carrier.”

“But they transfer the call records when you get a new phone, right?”

“If you keep the same number with the same company. Belinda wanted a new number because she'd been getting calls from a guy she used to go out with who didn't seem to understand what ‘Stop calling me’ means.”

“Wait a minute. Who's this guy? Where is he? Why didn't the chief know about him?”

“The guy is in school in Montana, and she hadn't heard from him since she switched phones, according to Belinda's roommate from last year. She said that the guy wasn't threatening, wasn't abusive, he was just a pain in the butt.”

“Had she told the police about this?”

“The police never contacted her. She opted not to join a sorority, and she and Belinda just drifted apart this year. But she did give me the name of the kid who'd been calling, Clifford Steck.”

“Had she ever mentioned him to you?”

“No. This is the first I've heard of him.”

“I need to call him.”

“I already did. He says he hasn't spoken with Belinda since last June, there's been no contact there at all. Offered to send me copies of his phone bills. And
I went one better than just calling Steck. Between last night and this morning, I called every one of the numbers Belinda called or received calls from over the past two years.”

“That's a lot of calls.”