Dying Echo A Grim Reaper Mystery - By Judy Clemens Page 0,68
the victim of a million nicknames, and none of them are nice.”
Casey scanned the page. “What year is this? It has to be before high school, if Elizabeth disappeared when she was fourteen.”
Eric turned the yearbook over. “1995. The year she went missing. Look, if you read these you can see that all of the notes were people saying they hoped she was all right and she’d be back. It was signed after she was gone.”
Casey shuddered. “Creepy.”
“Or nice. Betsy’s way of keeping hope alive.”
“Think that’s what this was about, too?” She held up some dried flowers and a statue of Saint Anthony.
“Except if she put him in the box it must mean she thought he wasn’t doing his job. And now…Elizabeth is finally found, but not really.”
She set the statue aside, and Death took a good look at it. “Nope. Not a good likeness. Nose is too small. I tell you, Tony has got quite the honker. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I always marvel that he can find anything, because I can’t believe he can look past his nose.” Death chortled.
Casey pulled out the last thing in the box, which was a canvas bag, zipped shut. It was filled with things you might expect a teenage girl to have—lip gloss, a brush, a well-worn teenage romance novel—plus some simple necessities, like deodorant, maxi-pads, toothbrush and toothpaste, and even a Walkman, with a Cars CD in it.
“I bet this is Elizabeth’s stuff,” Casey said. “Think Betsy cleaned out the car afterward?”
“Someone did. But where are all their other things? Clothes, shoes, you know. And when they lost their house, did they lose everything?”
“What in the world is this, though?” A cardboard cylinder, like the kind you mail posters in, was stuffed in with the toiletries. Casey pulled out the papers, which turned out to be blueprints.
“Looks like cabinet designs.”
“Why would Elizabeth have them?”
“Don’t know. Maybe she was just holding them for him, since they lived in a car? Or it could be they just got stuck in here afterward, when everything was chaos.”
“Someone’s coming,” Death said.
The front door opened, and Betsy rejoined them. “I told Dad.” She sat heavily in a chair. “He didn’t want to talk about it.”
“Shocked that she was still alive?”
“Stunned. He never said, but I always thought he believed she was dead way back then. That she’d died the same night as Uncle Cyrus.”
“Did he say why he thought that?”
“No, but I guess because it was too painful to think otherwise.”
“You mean that she’d killed him herself?”
Betsy blinked. “We never thought that.”
“Never?”
“No!” She brushed something from her pant leg. “There were always some people who did, but not us. Not her family.”
“So what didn’t your father want to face?”
Her head snapped up. “What do you think? That she’d been kidnapped, raped, murdered.” Her eyes filled again. “Which is what did finally happen, didn’t it? Not the kidnapped part, but the other. Why would anyone—” She closed her eyes and pressed her fingers against her mouth, like she had before.
Casey tipped the canvas bag so the opening was toward Betsy. “Elizabeth’s belongings?”
Betsy sniffed and opened her eyes. “It’s all they would let me have. They took all her clothes, I don’t know what they did with them. The car, her schoolbooks, whatever there was in the station wagon, that was all gone, too. Evidence, they said. This was in her gym locker at school, so I guess they sort of forgot about it. Once the teacher found it at the end of the year, the cops had basically given up, so she just gave it to me.” She fingered the material. “It’s really all I have left of her.”
“Know what these are?” Casey showed her the blueprints.
“Uncle Cyrus was working for a houseboat manufacturer when he got laid off, so I guess those are some of his designs. Lizzie was probably keeping them safe in her locker since the car wasn’t exactly secure. Not like a house. They’d be for his portfolio, I imagine.”
“Speaking of houses, what happened to everything else when they lost theirs? Did they store it somewhere, one of those storage units, or something?”
“Nope. All gone. What wasn’t sold in the auction to pay off debts went to Goodwill, if it was worth anything. Or else Uncle Cyrus just got rid of it.”
“No pictures? Toys? Nothing?”
“He said it was too painful to see things from their old life.”
Eric waved a hand at the photos. “But living in a car was better?”