her. Born in the summer. She’s nine. Cutest thing ever, of course.” She smiled. “Third grade and giggly as anything. Billy is seventeen. Not exactly a giggler. I was still in high school myself when he was born. Got married when I was eighteen, but we’d already had him before then. He’s a good boy. Gets good grades, plays soccer. Worst thing he’s ever done was to be late for school once last month. He’s kind of moody, especially this past month, but that’s to be expected with a senior, right?” She cleared her throat. “Sorry. You probably don’t want to know all about their lives. That’s my husband, Scott.” She pointed to the man in the family picture, a nice-looking guy with a cheesy grin, messy black hair, and wire-rimmed glasses. Casey liked him on sight.
“I didn’t mean to snoop,” Casey said.
“It’s no problem. We don’t have anything you shouldn’t see. Or, if we do, it’s buried under piles of laundry.” Which could easily have been the case, seeing how the small sitting room across the kitchen’s island had clothes mountains to rival the Rockies.
Betsy tipped a Marshland Elementary lunch calendar to the side to show a picture underneath—the same one Eric had found when they’d looked up Elizabeth’s disappearance on the Internet. “Lizzie’s last school photo.” Her smile faltered. “We used to pretend we were twins sometimes.” She looked at the photo for a few more seconds before allowing the menu to hide it again. “Come see what I found.”
Betsy and Eric had moved the mess on the dining room table to one side, and Betsy placed two boxes on the cleared end. “This box is just photo albums and stuff from when I was little. Lizzie would be in there, especially before high school, when her mom was still around. After she died, well, it seems like they would have come around more, doesn’t it? But Uncle Cyrus sort of …I don’t know…it was almost as if he thought he and Lizzie had suddenly become this burden on us. And he was so angry about it all. About Lizzie’s mom dying. I still saw Lizzie at school, and at church when they’d show up, but it wasn’t like it had been.”
Casey looked at a photo Betsy put on the table. Elizabeth appeared just about as she did on that last school photo. Cyrus seemed healthy and happy, and the woman—“What was her name?”
“Vivian. Vivvie, Cyrus would call her. To me she was Aunt Viv.”
“How did she die? Cancer?”
“Pancreatic. It was like one day she was fine, and the next she was dying. It was terrible. You can’t see it in this picture, even though five months later she was dead. I remember, because we all got our family portraits done at the same time, at church, you know, when we made a new directory. The pictures were taken in the fall the year before everything happened with Cyrus and Elizabeth. By the time Christmas came around they didn’t even send out the photo with their cards because Aunt Viv looked like a different person by then.” She rubbed her finger gently across the photo, then heaved a huge album out of the box. “These are just random shots from when we were kids. This and that. But here—” she turned to the back pages “—this is the nineties, when we were teens. There’s Liz and Wayne Greer and me and Scott. I had just found out I was pregnant. I hadn’t told Scott yet, but Lizzie knew. She was younger than the rest of us, but she was my cousin, so she hung out with me and my friends.”
Betsy looked remarkably carefree in the picture, for having such a heavy secret. Perhaps it hadn’t quite sunk in yet. Or perhaps she really didn’t care that her “innocent” teenage years were about to come to a crashing end.
“What about Elizabeth and Wayne?” And why did that name sound familiar?
“They weren’t actually an item, at least, not yet. If he’d had his way they would’ve been married already.” She laughed. “Not really, but he had it bad for her. I’m pretty sure she was in love with him, too, but you know how it can be when you’re teenagers and friends and you don’t want to mess things up. This was taken just before her dad lost his job. Aren’t too many pictures after that.” She paged through. “Look, there’s a copy of the one Lizzie took of Uncle