Dying Echo: A Grim Reaper Mystery (Grim Reaper Series) (26 page)

“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?”

“It could have been.” Casey understood. She’d spent the past few years living as far from her old life in ways much deeper than simple geography. She’d spent nights in train cars, run-down farm sheds, even cornfields. Sometimes that was easier than even the thought of sleeping in the same bed she had shared with Reuben. “Can you tell us who these people are?”

She slid the photo of the two men across the table, and Betsy frowned at it. “Never saw them before.” She looked at the date stamped on the back. “Lizzie must have taken this when she had the camera.”

“Is there anyone who might know who they are? What about your dad?”

She frowned. “I told you. Uncle Cyrus would never tell him anything. Dad was always complaining about it. So if Cyrus knew these guys I think you’d be better off talking to somebody else. Maybe Wayne.”

“The guy from the photo of you four?”

“Yeah. Wayne never let the whole living in a car thing change how much he saw Lizzie, so he knew more about her life than I did after a while. Plus he was a guy, so maybe Uncle Cyrus told him something. Or Lizzie did.”

“Think you could get us in touch with him?” It would be good to talk with the one person they knew Elizabeth remembered.

“I can try.” She went in the other room, and they could hear her talking. She came back, looking amused. “He says he was already planning on meeting with you.”

“What?” Casey looked at Eric. “Did you set something up?”

He was shaking his head at the same time Betsy said, “No, it was his kid, Robbie. He works at the motel. Says you talked to him last night.”

Robert. The nonsleeping high schooler. “Right. His dad went to school with Elizabeth. Wait—Wayne is Robbie’s dad? The guy in the picture with the four of you just so happens to be the motel kid’s father?”

“I told you it was a small town.” Her eyes went distant. “It about crushed Wayne when Lizzie disappeared. He held out for her a long time, but then…” She shrugged. “We all had to go on, didn’t we? I mean, that’s life. I really thought he’d give up sooner than he did, but I guess some guys can surprise you. I don’t think he ever really did let her go. Not all the way.”

“
Ahem
,” Death said, and pointed at Eric. “Think you’ve got one of those here, Casey. He’s put up with your BS for the entire time he’s known you—which, granted, is only a few weeks—and is still here. That’s saying something.”

“So when are we meeting him?” Casey asked Betsy.

“How does right now strike you?”

Chapter Twenty-eight

“It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about her,” Wayne Greer said. He was a good-looking thirty-something man wearing jeans and an Astros T-shirt. Casey could see Robbie in his face, and in the wavy brown hair. He gripped his glass of Coke so hard Casey was afraid it was going to break, and he swiped his other hand across his head, so some of the hair stood up, making him look younger, more like the boy Elizabeth had been falling in love with back in the nineties. Betsy sat next to him in the booth, looming over him in protective woman mode, like this news was going to make him crack.

The photo of Elizabeth—Alicia—and Ricky lay on the table, and Wayne apparently couldn’t decide whether to look at it or pretend it didn’t exist. “I can’t believe she’s dead.”

“Didn’t you already think she was? After all this time?”

“I don’t know, I guess I’d always thought she’d made it out somehow. It just didn’t feel right that she could be so alive one day and then…it sounds stupid, I know. But they never found her body, and I just didn’t
feel
like she was dead. Does that make any sense?”

“Not really,” Death said from the next booth over. “But then, I don’t make sense to most people, especially when they’re in love, or think they are. Did you
see
these cool miniature juke boxes? Right on the tables? Do you have a quarter?”

“You never heard from her?” Casey asked Wayne.

“No.” He ran his finger through the condensation that rimmed his glass.

“What about these guys? Do you recognize them?” Casey put the photo of the strange men on the table.

Wayne glanced at it like he couldn’t really care any less. “Sure. What about them?”

Eric’s knee knocked Casey’s, but when she looked at him it seemed he hadn’t done it on purpose.

She returned her attention to Wayne. “Who are they?”

Wayne shrugged. “Some guys Cyrus knew. He worked with them, maybe. Liz didn’t like them, said they were bossy, and pretty rude to her dad. And she said they always came sort of secret and quiet, like they didn’t want anyone else to see them. They got all hinky when I was there once.”

“Was there another man who hung out with them?”

“Yeah.” He made a face. “Pretty creepy. Never said anything, but was always around when they showed up. Liz couldn’t stand him. Actually, if she saw him coming she took off. Said he scared her.”

“So were these guys Cyrus’ employers?”

“I guess. Not sure, though. Never even heard their names. Or what they did.”

“Robbie was telling me about ‘bad guys’ Cyrus hung out with,” Casey said, “but that no one knows for sure what they were doing that was bad. Would he be talking about these three?”

“Robbie?” He gave a half-laugh. “That boy sees criminals everywhere he looks. He’d have half the town in jail if we believed everything he suspected. And that’s just the stuff happening now. The town’s history is apparently an open booking session.”

The waitress came with their lunches, hamburgers and fries for everyone but Betsy, who got a small salad that she didn’t even touch. Wayne picked up his burger, then set it down and wiped his hands absently on his napkin.

“So you don’t think Cyrus was into anything illegal?” Casey asked.

“I can’t imagine it. He was a straight shooter. Wouldn’t take charity—wanted to pay his own way, which is supposedly why they lived in a
car
. He didn’t drink, didn’t do drugs, there weren’t any other women…” He looked down at the table for moment, but then shrugged. “Liz didn’t seem to mind too much, about the car. She’d spend nights at Betsy’s sometimes, and I know he and Liz went to the church to sleep when it got super cold that one week.”

Betsy started. “Really? I didn’t know. Oh,
why
wouldn’t they come stay with us?”

“You know why. And like I said, I think Liz was okay with ‘camping out’ most of the time. She used the showers at school, and only slept in the car. She could study at one of our houses, or the library. She was okay. I think she felt like she sort of had to take care of her dad, ever since Vivian died. That pretty much destroyed him.”

Betsy frowned and crossed her arms, shaking her head.

“Back to these men,” Casey said. “Any idea what work Cyrus was doing for them?”

“Something temporary. He kept telling Liz it was just for a while, then those men would be gone. It was something he was good at, probably to do with woodworking. He was a master craftsman, people were lucky if they got something built by him.”

“Woodworking? That doesn’t sound criminal.”

“I told you, it wouldn’t have been. Not with Cyrus.”

Casey spun the photo around and looked at it again. Elizabeth—Alicia at the time of her death—had said it was the Three. It had to mean these three men, didn’t it? “Were these guys questioned after Cyrus was murdered?”

“Maybe. I hadn’t seen them around for a while. Cyrus went out of town sometimes, I guess to work, and Liz seemed to think Cyrus’ time with them was almost done. I’ve never seen them since Cyrus died.”

“She’d stay with me those nights Uncle Cyrus was gone,” Betsy said. “He told her she wouldn’t be able to hang out at the work site. I was always glad when she came, but it wasn’t often enough.”

Eric pulled out his notes. “We didn’t see anything in the newspaper articles about these guys, or about the cops even questioning anybody but Elizabeth. In fact, the media got on the Marshland cops for not knowing what they were doing.”

“Yeah, well.” Wayne frowned. “That was the big time folks thinking they knew more than people they considered hicks. The cops here did everything they could. They knew Cyrus and Liz, so it’s not like they didn’t want to catch whoever did it. They talked to all of us, all of their family, everyone Cyrus ever worked for. But there was nothing to go on. Forensics weren’t the same then as they are now, and the stuff they had just took them nowhere. The bullet couldn’t be matched to any guns, there weren’t any unknown fingerprints on the car—”

“How do they know that?”

“We all got fingerprinted,” Betsy said. “All their friends and family. And there weren’t any prints they couldn’t match to people who had a reason to be in or around the car.”

“Like people they knew couldn’t have done it,” Death said. “You humans are so loyal. Or stupid. Any luck finding that quarter?”

“There were tons of calls from people who thought they saw Lizzie after that,” Betsy continued. “You know, like on cop shows when they set up a line for information. But none of them ever panned out. They were mostly cranks. After a few months the calls stopped coming, and the cops stopped looking.”

“They didn’t stop look—”

“Wayne, they
stopped
.”

He picked at the placemat that was now sodden from his glass. “What else were they going to do? They put her photo all around, all over the Internet, you know, at least as much as there was. Facebook wasn’t around yet—there really wasn’t anything like social media, unless you count faxing her picture to cops all over the country. But what else were they going to do? They couldn’t buy space on milk cartons for the next however many years it’s been since she left.”

Like he didn’t know the exact number of years—or perhaps months, or even days. The knowledge was there to read in his eyes, and in the lines beside his mouth.

“But that begs another question,” Casey said. “She wasn’t here, but she was obviously alive.”

Wayne looked from the photo of Alicia and Ricky to Betsy. “She really did look just like you.”

“Yeah, I know.”

They had a sad moment together as they gazed at the picture.

“So where would a fourteen-year-old go?” Casey said. “She would have no license, no vehicle, probably not much money.” It sounded, in fact, a lot like Casey’s first days on the road, before the settlement had loaded her bank account. Except she’d been a grown woman with resources no teenager would have. “Relatives? Friends somewhere else?”

“They would have told us,” Betsy said. “You don’t take in a girl and not tell her family where she’s gone. Especially not when her father has just been murdered.”

“Or maybe that’s exactly why they didn’t tell,” Casey said.

“What do you mean?”

“We don’t know where Elizabeth was the night Cyrus died. What if she saw the whole thing? What if Cyrus’ killers knew she was there? She wouldn’t be safe anywhere. She would have to stay completely hidden. Even if that meant someone not telling.”

“But after all this time? Surely they would have said something by now.”

“Because the danger had passed? Somehow I don’t think it had.” She met Betsy’s eyes, and Betsy stifled a sob. Obviously the danger hadn’t passed. Not if Elizabeth’s death was connected to whatever had happened in Marshland back in the 90’s.

“We don’t know that her…her murder had anything to do with this,” Wayne said. “It could have been something else. Some random killer. After this many years she couldn’t have been afraid of them anymore. Why would they still be looking for her? It’s been so long.”

“So why didn’t she come home?”

“Any number of reasons. She’d found somewhere better. She’d found some
one
.” He used a finger to flick the photo of her and Ricky across the table. “I don’t know. Maybe she just didn’t want to come back to the place where her father died. Or maybe she was glad for a new start and was happy to be rid of us all.”

His voice rose, betraying his anger and hurt. His old girlfriend, whom he’d been grieving for years, had been alive and well—and hadn’t told him. Casey could only imagine how much that would sting.

Eric broke the awkward silence. “Betsy, would you have a list of family or friends she might have run to after Cyrus’ death?”