Chapter 45
Night Eighteen
Sybil
They still hadn’t heard back from the Macon Telegraph reporter, and when they shot an email to Caleb, it bounced an out-of-office back to them.
Sybil was getting antsy, losing whatever fitful sleep she could manage, dreaming of dooming scenarios where Betty was in danger.
She’d actually doze off for a few minutes, then jolt up, check her texts, as if maybe she were clairvoyant and Betty was trying to reach her in her subconscious.
The flip phone charger finally showed up after holiday shipment delays and a lost tracking number waylaid it somewhere at a Los Angeles airport.
Sybil was back at her house with Eloise when Zeke called to tell her.
He promised he wouldn’t search the phone until she got there.
Eloise was hosting a “small” New Year’s Eve get-together with some of her high school friends, and Sybil had planned to be there, albeit tucked in her bedroom, to ensure nothing went sideways.
Mark had evidently already signed off on the idea—convenient, since he wasn’t living in the house anymore—and by the time Eloise informed Sybil, she’d already invited her high school crew.
Now she had to go into the city and trust that Eloise wouldn’t burn down the house.
A terrible metaphor given the circumstances but alas, the one that sprang to mind.
She swiped mascara over her lashes and thought of all the things she should have said to Mark when he so blithely asked, “What’s the big deal, Eloise is only home for a few more days,” then got out of all the responsibility that came with hosting underage college freshmen on New Year’s Eve.
Her phone buzzed again. Natalie had sent an attachment.
Natalie: They decided to run a different cut of Betty’s commercial nationally. Bigger check, more residuals. No word from her? I wanted to tell her.
Sybil’s heart lurched as she clicked on the link.
She hadn’t shared the details of the church fire with Natalie, of the Revivalist upbringing, the implications of where the facts were leading them.
Like maybe if she told anyone else, outside her bubble with Zeke, she’d have to see the judgment on their faces, hear the judgment in their voices.
Wait, she could hear Natalie say, Betty might have burned down a church?
With the congregation inside? I vouched for this girl?
I need to get this commercial off the air, the client will murder me.
Sybil wouldn’t blame her.
The video filled her phone screen. Betty looked so beautiful, and Sybil thought maybe she’d forgotten her face, the crystal blue of her eyes, the tapered nose, the shimmery blonde hair.
She used two fingers to zoom in on a close-up.
No, it wasn’t that Sybil had forgotten. It was that Betty never looked this way around them, as if she were constantly trying to blend in, wearing her own disguise.
The realization nicked another piece of her insides.
That maybe Betty never trusted her at all; that maybe Betty had been playing them all along.
Sybil double-clicked the video to give it a thumbs-up, let Natalie know she’d seen it.
By the time she arrived at Zeke’s apartment, she’d watched it no fewer than twenty times, even if it was just a slightly different iteration than the first one. At every stoplight, in the logjam on the bridge into the city. She didn’t have the right to feel so betrayed, and yet, she did.
Zeke greeted her at his door with a party hat, a noisemaker and a flute of champagne.
Sybil’s shoulders were up toward her ears, her jaw tight. But Zeke looked so charming, so exuberant that she didn’t want to kill the vibe. Eloise had accused her of being a “vibe killer” earlier today when Sybil put her foot down at a keg delivery.
She let Pluto off his harness, then clutched the flute stem, and he tinked her glass.
“Happy New Year,” he said, and she thought maybe he was already a little tipsy.
Zeke didn’t drink very often, especially not now when his team was laser-focused on his recovery, and even though he was a solid two hundred and thirty pounds, it might not take all that much to turn him a tad swoony.
“You look very pretty tonight,” he said, kissing her cheek.
His hand moved to that spot on her shoulder she was always rubbing, and he squeezed, like he was letting her know that he noticed. He’d noticed.
“Should we go through the phone before we start drinking?” Sybil replied, though she knew her skin was flushed like she was having a hot flash, and she couldn’t meet his eyes.
Did she look pretty tonight? She had tried to, of course, though the sleeplessness made it a challenge. It thrilled her that Zeke noticed.
“Sure, yes, absolutely.” He closed the door behind her and disappeared, then reemerged with the phone and the type of plug that Sybil probably had in a box in her garage somewhere, a leftover relic she couldn’t part with from a decade earlier.
“But in case it’s not obvious, I already started.
” He shrugged one shoulder, and his mouth edged up on one side, the sort of smile Charlie, her impish son, knew exactly when to employ to get away with trouble.
In the kitchen, Sybil took a gulp of the champagne just for show, then glanced at their pathetic evidence wall and drank half the glass.
Zeke had plugged the phone in by his espresso maker. Sybil had to don her reading glasses because the screen was so small.
“The last time I had one of these,” Zeke said, “I think I was a senior in high school.”
Sybil didn’t want to tell him that she was so old, the last time she’d had a flip phone was in her residency, already a fully formed adult and heavily pregnant with the twins, while he wasn’t even legally able to vote.
Zeke pressed a series of buttons and landed on the address book.
There was only one entry.
L.
Followed by a number with an area code Sybil didn’t recognize.
“Levi,” Sybil said. “It has to be Levi. I…overheard her calling him on Thanksgiving.”
Zeke narrowed his eyes. “I don’t get the impression she’s used this phone in a while.” He clicked another button, and they returned to the analog home menu.
“Right, no. But she did call him that night.”
“Eavesdropping?” Zeke turned to her and smiled.
“Definitely not.”
“Sybil.”
“What?”
“Come on,” he said.
“Fine,” she conceded. “Eavesdropping.”
Zeke looked utterly delighted.
“You’re a little drunk,” she added. “We need to be serious. This is serious.”
Zeke put on a stern face and clicked a bunch of buttons, and they landed on the long-ago texts. The last one came in from Las Vegas.
L: Hey, look where I am!
A photo of a young man, scruffy facial hair, a crew cut and oversized jeans and a hoodie that read USA.
Betty: are u in paris?????
L: Haha, vegas. but it feels like a foreign country.
“Wait!” Zeke grabbed Sybil’s shoulder, then darted out of the room.
Sybil abandoned the phone on the counter and trailed him. She found him on the floor of Betty’s bathroom, the flour tin between his legs. He pried off the lid, then pulled out the stack of postcards. They were blank, so neither Sybil nor Zeke had initially paid them any mind.
Zeke flipped through them until he found the one with the wide-angle shot of the Vegas Strip.
“Voilà,” he said, and handed it to her.
“I didn’t realize these were postmarked.
” She sat beside him, and they pressed their backs against the tub.
The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC; Fenway Park in Boston; Niagara Falls; Mount Rushmore; the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia; the Rock the Fountains of Bellagio in Vegas; the Four Corners in the Southwest.
“A map, of sorts.”
“But a map of where her brother has already been,” Sybil said. The postmark from Vegas was from nearly a year back. Not so long ago, but a lifetime when you’re looking for someone. The others were a scattershot of months across years. “So I’m not sure how that helps us.”
“This must be how Levi told her where he was,” Zeke said.
“But they had the cell phone. Doesn’t that seem more efficient?”
Zeke dipped his head back, closed his eyes.
“I never snooped on her, obviously. But I can’t remember ever hearing her on her phone. It’s not like she really had friends, now that I think about it. So I think I would have noticed…if she’d been talking to someone.”
“Well, she also obviously knew what she was doing, blending in, shape-shifting of sorts.” Sybil pulled out her own phone now and tapped on Natalie’s text. “Look at her here. She’s…well, she doesn’t look like the Betty we knew.”
They watched the commercial in silence.
“Maybe they agreed to only talk every once in a while. Let’s say she did burn down that church,” Zeke said. “Or let’s say…maybe Levi did.”
“I think he was gone by then, right? Didn’t she tell us that? That he was the only one who left, who got out?”
“Okay, but hypothetically, let’s think like Julian.” Zeke pushed to his feet, then held out his hand to hoist her up. He didn’t realize until he’d done so that he’d offered her his throwing arm.
“Your arm!” she said, and beamed.
“Oh yeah. My arm,” he replied. “We’ll see.”
They returned to the kitchen. Sybil pulled out Julian’s file.
“Okay, so we’re thinking like Julian. And one of them is the suspect?” Sybil asked. She liked this. She liked this very much. This was exactly how she envisioned it would be if she were a true crime podcast host or a producer on Dateline.
“Maybe Levi dropped her a postcard when he left for someplace new. Or when he got someplace new, I guess,” Zeke said.
He tore off a piece of tape and pressed the Las Vegas postcard on their evidence wall.
Sybil didn’t mean to notice that his biceps rippled when he did, but she didn’t mean to not notice either.
“And maybe they had an agreement to check in only if something was wrong? Like a break-in-case-of-emergency number?” Sybil added.
“But you heard her call him on Thanksgiving.”
“Check the log on the flip phone,” Sybil said. “But I swear it was with her iPhone—I saw her using it that night at my dining table, which means that either she was really worried or really desperate.”
“Or getting sloppy,” Zeke said. He finished off his flute and poured another one, then topped off Sybil’s.
“The log,” she said. “And thank you.” She raised her glass and drank. Why not. It was New Year’s Eve, after all. And she was pleased, tickled, to see their evidence wall bloom into something like a real police case.
His thumb worked its way through the buttons, then stopped.
“Last call on this phone was in September.”
“So just before we all met,” Sybil said.
“But maybe before she got spooked by Julian?”
His eyes widened, and hers did the same.
“You think she ran because of Julian?” Sybil said. Her pulse was racing now; this felt like something, she didn’t know what though. But something. That’s what she was missing from her life. Not surgery, not medical school. But a problem needing to be solved. Her phone buzzed. Eloise. Fuck.
A picture of her daughter holding up a glass of water.
Eloise: I’m behaving, see?
This wasn’t Sybil’s first rodeo, unfortunately.
Sybil: how do I know that isn’t vodka?
Three dots appeared, then disappeared.
Sybil grabbed her flute and finished it.
“I don’t know why she ran,” Zeke said, on his way to top her off again. “But maybe we piece together Levi’s route, his map, and find his final stop. What if wherever Levi is, that’s where we’ll find Betty?”