Was that why? She had named me after her deceased daughter, but couldn’t go all the way and call me by the same exact name? Was that why I was always Elizabeth? My mouth felt dry, almost cottony. I swallowed, trying to bring moisture back to my mouth.
Gordon said, “Beth didn’t get along very well with your mother. Her mother. She was a teenager, and she had some problems.”
“What year was this?” I asked.
“Beth died in 1975.” He sipped the coffee. The baby at the table near ours started to cry. I watched the mother lift it from its high chair and pull it close, gently soothing it with whispered words. “It wasn’t that unusual to be a rebel back then, at that time. And there were a lot of things for young people to get involved in. I’m sure you can imagine.”
“Are you talking about drugs?” I asked.
“Drugs, yes.”
“That wasn’t unique to the seventies,” I said. “Kids can still do that now.”
“Sure,” he said. “Of course. But there was something in the culture then, something that almost required it of young people. A lot of them were getting high and dropping out. Kids ran away. You know, they’d just up and quit school and decide to move somewhere else, somewhere more exciting than Ohio. Oregon. California. Who knows? Beth was becoming one of those kids. She was troubled. And she was a troublemaker. She had some run-ins with the police. Minor stuff up to that point. She ran with the wrong kind of crowd. Certain kids from the school who were also into the drugs and the drinking and the partying. Some of the kids were older. I knew that on a few occasions she came down here and hung out on campus, going to parties with older kids and who knew what else.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m not sure that behavior is that unusual for a teenager whether it was in 1975 or today. Some kids party and run around with a faster crowd. It’s normal teenage rebellion. I did some of those things in high school and certainly in college.”
“About two months before Beth was killed, your mom found something in her room.”
He paused, letting the words hang in the air.
“What did she find?” I asked.
“She found a bag of drugs and a couple of hypodermic syringes,” he said. “Real, hard drugs. Heroin.”
I didn’t say it out loud because I didn’t have to, but I understood his point. Heroin was a major step up. It wasn’t just teenage rebellion and mischief.
“What did Mom do?” I asked.
“We did what any parent would do,” he said. “We sat her down and we confronted her. We told her, in no uncertain terms, that she was not to bring that kind of thing into our house ever again. We laid down the law, the way parents are supposed to in a case like that.” His voice took on a firmness, a conviction that hadn’t been there before. It sounded like these were the words he truly believed. “You know, back then parents were much more comfortable laying down the law like that. We could say to a child, ‘It’s my way or the highway.’ It was a better way to raise a child.”
“Did you try to get her help?” I asked.
“Help?” he said, his voice dismissive. “We didn’t used to believe people with drug problems needed help. We used to believe in an application of will. If the kid couldn’t do it, then the parents did. I still believe that.”
“She was fifteen,” I said. “Don’t you think she deserved a break?”
“I knew her,” he said, his voice cold. “She was my daughter. I knew how to raise her.”
I sensed a dead end, a point at which Gordon Baxter and I were not going to agree. And I really didn’t care to push him—I hadn’t come for a debate about parenting styles. I wanted to learn about my mother’s life.
“So what happened?” I asked.
“She ran away,” he said.
“I thought you said—”
“She came back,” he said. “She was gone for a few days, probably crashing at a friend’s house. Or God knows where. It drove your mother crazy with worry. I don’t think Leslie slept the whole time Beth was gone. When Beth came back, things just got worse. She was skipping school. Coming home late. If we grounded her, she snuck out.” He sighed. “One night the police brought her home. She had snuck out and gone to a party. When the police broke up the party, they found out Beth was underage, and they brought her home to us. What could be worse for a parent than to have the police bring your child home in the middle of the night?”
“I’m guessing the murder part was worse,” I said.
He studied me from across the table, his eyes growing flat and glassy. I imagined having him for a father was a laugh riot. I suspected that if he could get away with it he probably would have slapped me right there in McDonald’s.
“Children shouldn’t talk to adults like that either,” he said, his eyes still flat. “It shouldn’t matter whether the adult is your parent or not.”
“I suspect you and I have some philosophical differences that we really can’t solve here. Do you want to tell me the rest of your story?”
“Aren’t you going to remind me of my time limit again?” he asked.
I looked at my watch. “You have twenty-five minutes left.”
Gordon sipped his coffee and didn’t say anything for a long moment. I started to wonder whether he was going to go on with his story at all, or whether he’d decided he’d had enough of me. Then he cleared his throat.
“She disappeared one night,” he said. “She went out with friends. We let her go out that night. You mom did anyway. Leslie thought like you, I suppose. She thought if you loosened the reins a little bit things might get better. So Beth went out one night with her friends and she never came back. At first, we thought she had just run away again. If someone does something like that once, then it’s certainly likely they would do it again. But after a few days when she didn’t return, we started to think something really had gone wrong. Maybe she had overdosed. Maybe she’d been taken against her will. So we finally called the police.”
“After a few days?”
“It’s easy to judge, isn’t it?” he said. “Especially with the hindsight of—what, thirty-seven years?” He let that sink in for a moment. Then he said, “The police investigated the disappearance. They talked to her friends and all of that. People at school. They didn’t find anything, nothing that would tell them what happened to her. Pretty quickly, they seemed to turn their attention to other things.”
“But a fifteen-year-old girl?” I said. “How could they just let her go so easily?”
“Like I said, it was a different time. People didn’t get all weepy over missing kids the way they do now. Kids weren’t the center of the world.”
“She could have been in danger,” I said. “She was in danger.” I found myself getting worked up over what seemed to me an injustice. This was my sister, my family. It must have ripped my mother’s heart out. How could anyone let such a thing happen? So casually? “You said she was murdered. Did they at least convict the guy responsible?”
“No,” he said.
“No?”
“They didn’t convict anybody,” he said, shaking his head. “They never even found her body.”
“Then how—?”
“The police decided she had run away again,” Gordon said. “We told them about the drugs, about the wild crowd. Kids from the town and the college ran off from time to time. They’d come back, but their parents would be worried sick. But it happened. This was before the Internet, remember. Before CNN. Before all those crime shows on cable TV. Kids ran away, and the police let them go.”
“But you say she was murdered.”
“A police officer gave me his theory once,” he said. “It was off the record, of course. Just something he’d concluded on his own. Are you familiar with the name Rodney Ray Brown?”