Chapter 43
Night Seventeen
Sybil
Christmas had come and gone, a depressing span of days that Sybil spent mostly by herself with her unadorned tree in her living room, while Eloise went back and forth between the pied-à-terre with Mark and the house in the suburbs.
After Sybil and Zeke had their disagreement the night before Christmas Eve, she returned to her empty house rather than bridge their gap.
She suspected she could convince him that they had to find Betty in order to help her, but then he made the last-minute decision to fly to Oklahoma for the holiday—he emerged from his room and said his physical therapist was on vacation so he was going to take one too.
She wanted to text him multiple times a day:
Did you hear back from the reporter?
Did the charger for the old flip phone arrive?
Do you miss me?
She flattened herself on the couch, not nearly as enveloping as Zeke’s, listening to Pluto’s snoring, and reached for her phone.
This was ridiculous! They were adults! She didn’t get into squabbles unless it was with her teenage daughter or her philandering husband!
She hadn’t gone this long without speaking to Zeke since they’d met in September, and she was pretty sure, with the holiday over and wrapped, he was back from Oklahoma by now.
Shortly before they’d argued, she’d overheard him talking to his agent about what came next in January, amping up his training to see where he could be by February, then into March and spring training.
Timothy was on speaker phone while Zeke paced in his kitchen, the tenor of Timothy’s voice all business, the tenor of Zeke’s the same.
Sybil had been under the misguided notion that maybe Zeke’s heart was no longer in it, in his rehab, in the game, but maybe she’d misread him.
Or maybe he’d let her misread him so that she thought they were more aligned, not just in what the future looked like, but in his focus on Betty, on helping her, on finding her.
Her phone buzzed in her palm, and she shot up, ramrod straight, startling Pluto.
She’d barely been working out lately, but all those years of Pilates evidently paid dividends.
Maybe Natalie was right. Maybe at forty-six, she still had it.
Maybe if she just took off her clothes for Zeke, her new doubts about what was going on with them would fall to the wayside.
No. This was foolishness, this was fantasy.
She swiped at her screen, her pulse palpable in her neck, as if maybe Zeke had been thinking of her at that exact moment too.
Simone: hi sybil, sorry to bother. know it’s late
Sybil: Simone! Hi! I’m so glad to hear from you. I’m up!
Simone: right, my dad had mentioned that
Sybil: Are you ok?
Sybil felt a rush of euphoria. It was demented, she realized, how much she wanted to be needed, how badly she needed to be put to use. Simone was grieving, and here Sybil was, using her for a contact high.
Simone: hanging in. been better, you know? anyway, i’m going thru my dad’s things and thought you might want his phone
Sybil: oh ok? You don’t want it?
Sybil had no idea why Simone would want her to have Julian’s phone, but if Simone was asking, then Sybil’s answer would be yes.
Simone: i take it no word from betty?
Sybil: Not yet.
Simone: ok, send me your address, i’ll take an uber
Sybil hadn’t realized Simone had meant she was giving her the phone now.
Sybil: I have a car! I can come to you!
Forty-five minutes later, at 2:12 a.m., Sybil pulled up to Julian’s old apartment building.
Pluto had fogged up the windows in the back, and she rolled down a window to air it out for a beat before heading in.
It was strange, seeing where her late friend lived, seeing where he had a whole life before he knew her and even during, and now that was all gone.
She thought of Betty, of what her old life must have looked like.
Unimaginable really. Maybe Zeke was right, maybe Betty did want to get lost. Maybe she had burned down the church, and even if she had killed those people, maybe Betty thought they had it coming.
That Sybil could understand, the vengeance of retribution against people who had taken so much from her.
She thought of Mark.
It wasn’t the same, of course, but he’d stripped something from her, too, over the years of their marriage.
She rolled up the window, opened the back seat for Pluto and made her way up Julian’s stoop.
The air was blustery, frigid, like if you weren’t careful, you could succumb to the elements quickly.
In medical school, Sybil had been fascinated with frostbite, how your limbs just…
died…like they weren’t even part of you anymore.
No feeling, no blood. Attached but dead all the same.
Julian’s apartment was cozier than she’d expected, a deep couch, a leather chair, a rich and ornamental patterned jewel-toned rug. Pluto immediately started sniffing the perimeter.
“We have a cat,” Simone said. “Or I guess I do now. Felix. He doesn’t mind dogs.”
Sybil unhooked Pluto’s leash and let him roam and took a long look at Simone before making the impulsive decision to hug her. Really really hug her. Like the girl needed a mother now that she didn’t have a father, and Sybil was going to hug her until she felt like she had one.
Simone eventually pulled back. “Thank you.” She had bluish circles under her eyes, her cheekbones so much sharper than just a few weeks back at Thanksgiving. “One second, let me get his phone.”
She wandered into another room right as a cat raced through with Pluto chasing it.
“Here,” Simone said when she returned, placing the phone in Sybil’s palm. “I removed the lock code so you don’t have to worry about that.”
“And you’re sure…I mean, I’m happy to take anything off your hands or help in any way,” Sybil said. Please please let me help in any way! “But you don’t need anything off this? Want anything from it?”
Simone shook her head like Sybil was aggravating her. “No, here.” She took the phone back and punched a few icons on the phone. “I’m tired, I’m sorry, I’m not explaining things right. You need his phone. Because of this.”
She passed it back to Sybil. It took Sybil’s brain a solid three seconds to catch up to what her eyes were seeing.
There was a picture of Betty taken from afar on a subway platform. She was being helped to her feet, having apparently fallen to the ground, by a tallish dark-haired man in a suit. Caleb.
“I don’t…” Sybil said. “What am I looking at?”
“It came into his texts the night of the hit-and-run.”
“The photo?” It was a dumb question, and she regretted asking stupid things of Simone, but she knew her brain was dulled from the lack of sleep.
“This photo.”
“And you think…that is not a coincidence?” Sybil considered herself an amateur expert in true crime, but even she didn’t see where the dots were connected.
“I think that my dad was tracking Betty for a long time. From what I can tell, he found her, here in his backyard, and you guys were a good excuse to meet her. Probably less threatening as a group than a solitary Black man showing up at her place of work asking questions,” Simone said.
“And maybe someone else didn’t like that very much, that he found her, was asking questions.
” She clenched her jaw. “Of course he couldn’t leave it alone. Of course he couldn’t just let it be.”
“Let what be?” Sybil’s knees felt unsteady, and she sank onto the arm of the couch. She was obviously aware that Julian was tied to Betty, but it hadn’t occurred to her that his death was somehow tied to Betty as well.
“I don’t really know,” Simone offered. “But I do know my dad. And if he thought that there was a loose end in one of his cases, he wasn’t going to quit until it was all sewn up. It nearly killed him four years ago. And my guess is that this time, it actually did.”