“Well,” she said, “this is certainly different from the rest of the museum.” She was carrying a folder, which she held close to her. They all moved to the round table to learn about the family tree of Leo Parrish.
“OK,” Beth said when they were all seated. “I’ll start with the Glendale-Marsh relatives. She pointed to each person on the chart as she named them, going from generation to generation. “Leo Parrish had an uncle, Luther Parrish, who lived in Glendale-Marsh in the thirties. He had two sons, Martin and Owen. Owen Parrish had a son. The son married and had a daughter-Oralia Lee Parrish. They all left Florida when Martin and Owen lost the family land. The daughter, Oralia Lee, married one Burke Rawson. They had no children that I can find a record of.”
“We should be able to locate the Rawsons,” said David.
“The last address I had for them was Ohio fifteen years ago,” said Beth. “Now, you mention that Leo Parrish wrote to someone when he was in the service. That was his sister, Leontine Parrish Richmond. She lived in Upstate New York.”
“Were they twins?” asked Diane.
Beth nodded. “Leontine had a daughter who was eleven years old in 1935.” She pointed to the chart with their names. “The daughter grew up, married, and had a son named Quinn Sebestyen,” said Beth. “He married a woman named Allie Shaw. And they had two children.”
“Christian and Melissa,” said Jin.
He was seated across the table from Beth and they all looked over at him, surprised.
Jin looked as if he had seen a ghost.
Chapter 49
All of them stared at Jin who slid the family tree toward him and studied it. “This is amazing,” he said.
“What?” said Neva. “You look like she just uncovered your relatives.”
“Do you know these people?” asked David.
Jin looked at Diane. “Do you remember when”-he snapped his fingers a couple of times-“when Dr. Webber asked me what I was interested in outside of work? It was in the morgue tent.”
Diane thought back to the time in the morgue tent. It seemed so long ago now.
“After Dr. Pilgrim took a break, after you found the fetal bones, and Dr. Rankin talked about how all we could do was pick up the pieces,” Jin said.
Diane remembered. She wondered if that moment was the trigger for Archie Donahue, realizing as Rankin did that they could never make a dent in the drug trade because the money was too great. All they could do was pick up the broken bodies and mourn the broken lives. Was that the thing that pushed Archie to “try to make a difference,” as he had said-if he was indeed the murderer of Blake Stanton and Marcus McNair?
“Yeah,” said Jin. “Remember, I was saying I was interested in strange disappearances. I was talking about that Court TV program about missing people-Judge Crater, Jimmy Hoffa, and some ordinary people who had disappeared mysteriously. Like that whole family that vanished. Their belongings were still in the house and even their car was still in the driveway.”
“What are you saying?” asked Diane.
“This was them-Quinn and Allie Sebestyen and their seven-year-old daughter, Melissa, and their ten-year-old son, Christian.”
“Oh, my, this is getting strange,” said Beth. She looked uneasily around her as if that’s what happened here in the dark side-strange things.
Diane needed a moment for the information to sink in.
“When was this?” she asked.
“About twenty years ago-1987, I think. Yeah, it was 1987,” said Jin. “Nothing was ever heard from them again.”
They all fell silent.
“Why don’t I leave this with you?” said Beth, rising from the table. “Shall I continue looking for information on these people?”
“As long as it doesn’t keep you from your other work,” said Diane.
“All of this was in records that I accessed via the Internet or by calling and asking some willing person to look up a marriage or death certificate,” she said.
“This is excellent work, Beth. Thank you,” said Diane.
David rose, escorted Beth out the door of the crime lab, and returned to the table.
“Nineteen eighty-seven,” said Diane. “The year Juliet was kidnapped. And they had a seven-year-old daughter-the same age as Juliet. She and Juliet could have been playmates.”
“I still feel like I’m missing something,” said David.
“I thought it was just me,” said Neva. “I’ve had a hard time keeping up ever since I got here. First, the code, and now it feels as though I’m missing part of this story.”
“I know,” said Diane. “I’ve been dribbling out information about Juliet-mainly because at first I didn’t know it was related to the Cipriano murder. It was just something I was doing to help one of my employees. Also, there’s some sensitive personal information on Juliet involved. But now it’s something we need to solve, because I think she is in danger.”
Diane went over the whole story of Juliet with them. She told them about Juliet’s memories and how Diane thought the fear of new dolls sprang from another crime Juliet had witnessed, and that being a witness had led to her kidnapping.
“Those are the crimes you had me look for in Arizona and Florida?” said David.
“Yes,” said Diane.
“You’ve been working on this mystery while you were working on the other crimes in Rosewood?” said Frank. “And running the museum?”
“Yes, and I haven’t been doing a very good job of any of it, but that’s going to change. Jin, did the TV program give any personal information on the Sebestyens?”
“Some. Not a lot. As I recall, Quinn Sebestyen was a math professor at a community college. His wife was a schoolteacher. The kids were good students. Everyone liked them. They were, by all accounts, an ordinary couple, an ordinary family. No marital problems that anyone was aware of, no great debt, no vices. The police couldn’t find any reason they would disappear on their own or why anyone would do them harm. The best they could come up with was that someone kidnapped them or murdered them for some unknown reason.”
“Did they ever vacation in Glendale-Marsh?” asked Diane.
“I don’t remember that town being mentioned in the TV program,” said Jin.
“Call the detective in charge of the case and ask him. See if he’ll send us more information,” said Diane.
“You think the Sebestyens are the dead people Juliet saw?” said David.
“Yes, I do,” said Diane. “How’s this for an hypothesis: Juliet was visiting her grandmother who lives at the beach in Glendale-Marsh, and she struck up a friendship with a little girl, one of the tourists. The little girl was Melissa Sebestyen. The genealogy chart Beth just provided to us shows that Melissa’s father, Quinn, was the grandnephew of Leo Parrish; Quinn’s grandmother was Leo’s twin sister. In the letters Leo sent home to his sister he probably sent the code and maybe even a book. It probably became a family heirloom. When Leo didn’t come home from the war, no one could crack his code. Quinn grew up with the story about Granduncle Leo and his hidden fortune in Florida. Quinn taught mathematics at a community college. Perhaps he inherited a family trait for being good with numbers and codes. He deciphered Uncle Leo’s code and went to Glendale-Marsh to find the treasure.”
“Where does the doll come in?” asked Frank.
“I’m not sure. Perhaps Quinn, being of a fanciful frame of mind, hid the code in his daughter’s doll for safekeeping, or perhaps the little girl hid it there.”
“Why would a kid do a thing like that?” said Jin.
Frank laughed.
“I’m just hypothesizing,” said Diane. “Maybe she knew the code was important. Maybe the doll was a courier. Anyway, Melissa knew it was there because she told Juliet the doll had a secret. That’s something a kid tells another kid. None of the adults would have told Juliet that.”