Chapter Thirty-Five. Riley, Present Day
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
RILEY, PRESENT DAY
The trill of my phone signaled a call from a creditor who’d obtained my number and sent me scrambling into investigative mode.
By the time Danny arrived, I’d talked to the bank, pulled my credit report, and was sitting at the dining room table with an untouched glass of wine in front of me, staring into space.
“Hey, baby! Is something burning?” Danny asked as he came through the door, flashing his easy smile.
Dinner was ruined, and so were we.
The next few weeks were a blur—of me yelling and Danny on his knees, just as he’d been when he proposed, and of me throwing him out then calling him crying late at night.
I lost chunks of time; I’d leave the house to drive to work, and find myself pulling into the parking lot with no memory of getting there.
I couldn’t sleep without taking Tylenol PM, and panic attacks plagued me in strange places—like the shower or an elevator.
I’d never known such deep, all-encompassing pain.
But right now, as I sit across from Betty at the dinner table, I witness it again.
“I am so sorry,” I tell her after I break the news about Ivy, Kathleen, and Helen, as cleanly and gently as I can.
Betty’s lips tremble and she bows her head.
When she lifts it, her face has collapsed.
I’ve always thought that her flawless skin—by now I know it’s a by-product of her lack of exposure to sunlight—makes her look decades younger than her real age.
But right now, she appears to be every one of her eighty-one years.
Her mouth opens and closes but no words come out.
“Oh, no,” she finally cries. “My beautiful girlfriends.”
I reach out and hold her hand. Her fingers are icy.
“Do you know the exact date this happened?” she asks in a near whisper.
I have to tell her the second part of what I learned from Sam. “The same day you left.”
I’m worried the news will break her. But Betty is stronger than I thought. The color slowly returns to her cheeks. Her back straightens.
“He killed them,” she whispers. And I see anger blazing in her eyes.
“I was told Helen committed suicide. Kathleen, too,” I say.
“But Kathleen murdered her husband with a baseball bat first?” she asks.
I nod. “Though they think it was an accident. She may have believed he was an intruder.”
“Kathleen may have held the bat, but she was driven to that terrible act by someone else entirely,” Betty says. “As was Helen.”
Our grilled cheeses are now cold and greasy on the plates in front of us. Neither of us can eat.
“One night long ago, we were all together,” Betty tells me. “We all had such vivid, unsettling dreams. Kathleen’s was about a baseball bat, but she didn’t understand the context. We never should have gone with him.”
“With Dr. Trimble?” I guess.
She flinches. “I haven’t heard his name in over sixty years. My husband and I never spoke of him after we left Marquis.”
“I learned about the Trimble Institute from Sandra Lennox,” I say.
My words are like a transfusion. “Ivy’s baby is alive?” Betty cries. Her grip on my hand tightens.
“Alive and well. She still lives in the area,” I say. “She became a therapist.”
“Oh, I would love to see her again.” Betty’s eyes soften. “I used to hold her and sing to her so her mama could get a little rest. Sandra was the most precious baby.”
“I think she’d love to see you, too. I have her phone number,” I tell Betty. “You can reach out to her whenever you’d like.”
“I’d like to call her right now,” Betty says. I dial Sandra’s number and put it on speaker. It goes directly to voicemail.
“She might be with a client,” I tell Betty. “But you can leave a message.”
Betty’s eyes are bright with unshed tears. “That voice. She sounds just like Ivy.”
At the beep, Betty looks at me questioningly. She has never encountered voicemail, I realize. So I quickly leave a message, telling Sandra that Betty would love to connect with her and to call me back anytime.
“Would you pour us another cocktail, dear?” Betty asks. “Tonight calls for it.”
I’m no mixologist, but I can make a simple gin and tonic. I add a generous squeeze of lime to the drinks and set one in front of Betty. I also find the bag of salted peanuts I bought at the grocery store, pour some into a little china bowl, and set them between us.
“There is one more piece of this,” I say once Betty has eaten a few nuts and has a little protein in her. “When I was trying to track down your friends, I went to look for the Trimble Institute archives at the Marquis library. But the files from 1964 were missing.”
“Maybe Dr. Trimble kept them for himself.”
I shake my head. “I don’t think so. The folders were labeled and a few of them were stretched out, like they’d held a bunch of papers. I think someone took them recently.”
Betty frowns. Then she pushes her wheelchair back from the island. “I’d like to show you something.”
She wheels out of the room as I jump up to follow her. Betty is going faster than usual, her strong arms churning the wheels. She stops at the old rolltop desk in the corner of the living room and opens a low drawer.
Inside is an item so shiny and current it’s utterly at odds with this room. It’s a FedEx envelope.
“Do you know what this is?”
“It’s a rush delivery company.” I search my mind for an example she can easily grasp. “Like the old telegrams.”
Betty pulls out the letter inside and I scan it. It’s written on Marquis University letterhead.
“‘Dear Mrs. Sadler,’” I read aloud. “‘It has come to our attention that your husband, at the time of this death, was in possession of academic files belonging to Marquis University. We request the immediate return of all papers and correspondence during the time of his employment with Marquis. You may use the enclosed envelope to return these documents.’”
But the address isn’t the same one on the letterhead. It’s a PO box.
I look up and see Betty watching me.
“The archive files from 1964 went missing recently,” Betty says slowly. “And I also received this special letter a month ago. Why is there such sudden interest in a program that was stopped sixty years ago?”
I underestimated her, I realize. Her genteel affect, her home that time forgot, even the fact that she doesn’t know what FedEx is belie the truth.
Betty’s mind is knife-sharp.
“I have no idea,” I tell her. “It was so hard to find information about your friends. It’s almost as if it was deliberately buried.”
“Like they don’t want anyone to ever know what happened,” Betty says softly. “But someone else is trying to learn about it now. I have no idea who that could be. Do you?”
“It’s possible a psychology professor at Marquis took the papers. He may have been the last one to visit the library to look at them before me.”
“What’s his name?”
“Joshua Woods.”
Betty shakes her head. “It doesn’t mean anything to me. Why would he want those old folders now? What was inside them?”
“I remember some of the labels,” I tell her. “One was Library Basement, but there was nothing inside.”
“Library basement,” Betty echoes.
“Do you know the meaning of that?” I ask.
Her voice is so rough and raw it’s almost unrecognizable.
“Inside the library basement, we were laboratory animals.”