Wes nodded, turning the pan over and dropping the first edible pancake onto a plate before pouring another scoop of batter in the skillet.
“After my dad died, I hooked up with a band and we started touring,” he grinned and looked embarrassed. “And by touring, I mean we drove around in a rusted van and begged dive bars to let us play for their drunken patrons. They paid us in booze.” He shook his head. “The dark ages. During my infrequent days of sobriety, I made a few calls. I never found her.”
Crystal tried to imagine letting her mother go. Had the woman tried to leave, Crystal would have chased her to the ends of the earth. But then, Crystal’s mother would never have left, not of her own free will.
“I tried again a couple years ago,” Wes said. “I was getting ready to turn thirty and… I wanted to know she was okay. I didn’t care if we had a relationship. I just wanted to put the questions to rest.”
Crystal waited, noticing the crease between his eyebrows, the stiffness that settled in his shoulders.
“Nothing. Not a thread of her anywhere. I searched through my dad’s stuff. I still have a few boxes. I found some of the old postcards she’d sent and I tried to track her through those, but her address changed frequently. She just disappeared.
Crystal started to ask more, but he cut her off.
“Enough about me. Did you grow up here in East Lansing?” he asked.
“No, but nearby. Dimondale. It’s west of town,” she said.
“Sure, yeah. I’ve been to the village bar once or twice. A pretty happening town,” he joked.
Crystal laughed. “Yeah, if you’re ninety. I wanted to travel after high school. Once I saw more of the world, I realized how tiny Dimondale truly is. My sister still lives in our childhood home. She sort of followed in my dad’s footsteps. He’s an archeologist. She’s an anthropologist. They’re two peas in a pod.”
“That’s great. It fascinates me when people pursue the same careers as their parents. Does your dad dig up dinosaur bones? That kind of thing?”
Crystal laughed. It was the most common question asked when she told someone her father was an archeologist.
“He’d absolutely love that,” she said, “but no. He used to do digs out of the country. He excavated skeletal remains in Australia and England with groups he was part of, but after my mom got sick, he shifted to a full-time teaching position and then a few years ago he retired. He’s part of the Michigan Archeological Society now. Most of his work these days involves directing young archeologists as they dig up old civilizations here in Michigan. They find pottery and tools.”
“Intriguing,” he admitted, holding up a plate stacked with pancakes.
“Voilà,” he announced. “I hope my goddess is hungry.”
Crystal grinned and stood to grab syrup and butter.
“For you,” she told him, “but I can make room for pancakes too.”
They ate at Crystal’s little kitchen table.
Weston flipped the cover on one of her journals.
“What’s this?” he asked, tapping the page where she’d written the series of seven numbers that had been plaguing her since childhood.
“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “It’s a number I’ve always had in my mind.”
“But you don’t know what it means?” he asked.
Crystal looked at the sequence, tilted her head sideways. Seven digits, seemingly random, and yet they’d been floating through her head for ages.
When had she first thought of the number? When she was seven or eight. She remembered carving the digits into an oak tree, something she felt guilty about later but at the time seemed okay. All the kids were doing it. Bette had carved, ”Bette and Crystal 4 Ever” into the same tree and then added a crude heart around the words.
“Six, two, five, one, nine, nine, one,” he read out loud. “It almost looks like nine-one-one in that part. A cry for help?”
He smiled at her in a mischievous way, a tell-me-more way, but a tremor crept down her spine at the suggestion. The numbers had been on repeat in her brain for years and yet, whenever she truly gave it her attention, a sense of foreboding surrounded the numbers.
“I do think they mean something,” she murmured.
“Like what?” he asked.
He squinted at the numbers and then picked up a pencil. He wrote an F beneath the number six.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Lining them up with the alphabet.” He finished and read the letters. “F - B - E - A - I - I - A. Fbeaiia? That mean anything to you?” he wondered.
She didn’t immediately answer. As she’d watched him transcribe the letters, her hands had begun to shake. Now, as she stared at the incomprehensible message, the fear slid away.
He looked at her and she shook her head, standing and grabbing his plate.
“Nope. Doesn’t mean a thing.” And it didn’t. But still, as she carried their plates to the sink, she found she didn’t want to turn around and look Weston in the eyes.
12
Now
Bette sat near Officer Hart’s desk.
She’d planted herself there nearly an hour before, refusing to leave until he told her what they’d found.
When he walked over, his eyes looked troubled.
“What?” she said, shooting to her feet. “Did you find her?”
Hart shook his head and set a folder of papers on the desk.
“No. There’s no sign of her in the woods. We have a search group still out there and two dogs. They couldn’t pick up a scent,” he explained.
“But something happened?” Bette insisted, searching his face.
“We interviewed Weston Meeks. Bette, are you aware that Mr. Meeks is married?”
“Wait,” Bette held up a hand, which trembled so badly she pressed it against her chest. “Did you just say he’s married? As in he has a wife?”
Officer Hart nodded.
“Yes, he’s married to—” He paused and looked at a sheet of paper before him, “Hillary Meeks. They have a house in Traverse City where she works as an ICU nurse at Munson Hospital.”
Bette’s heart raced beneath her hand.
“But they’re separated, right? Or getting divorced?”
Hart shook his head, lips set in a small thin line. “No, they’re not. We haven’t interviewed the wife, but we will. Wes came clean. He admitted he’s been having an affair, and that his wife knows nothing about Crystal.”
Bette squinted at the table that seemed to blur and shift.
“Was he with her when Crystal went missing?” Bette stammered.
“He claimed he was in Traverse City all day Friday. He saw Crystal Wednesday, returned to Traverse City that evening. The following day, he developed some kind of stomach bug and spent the rest of Thursday and all day Friday in bed. He returned to Lansing on Saturday.”
“Crystal said he teaches part time in Traverse City,” Bette mumbled. “Just a few classes on the side. Turns out he’s actually going home to his wife.”
Hart nodded. “He divides his time. He was teaching at Northwest Michigan College and got the offer from MSU two years ago. It was a position too good to pass up, but his wife loves Traverse City and wasn’t interested in moving. He spends three days a week in East Lansing teaching and the other four days at home. He’s been doing that for two years.”
Bette shook her head. “But he doesn’t spend four days at a home,” she said. “He spent almost all of his time with Crystal. Every time I called her, they were together. He wasn’t in Traverse City.”