Mrs. Porter didn’t laugh. “Your mother was very proud of you,” she said. “She talked about it all the time.”
I hadn’t expected those words, nor did I expect my response. I felt tears welling in my eyes. I don’t know whether Mrs. Porter noticed or not, but I turned away as fast as I could and headed for the microfilm drawers.
The task of making sense of the microfilm filing system gave me time to collect myself again. I blinked the tears away as I went through the drawers that held the Haxton Herald-Leader. It took a few minutes to work my way down the length of the filing cabinet. Then I had to run through the dates until I came across the right time frame. I found 1975, but that didn’t narrow things down much. A daily newspaper left me 365 days to choose from.
Then I remembered what Gordon Baxter had said about Beth. She had just started her sophomore year of high school. So I decided to begin with the microfilm for the month of September.
I threaded the strip through the machine, turned the viewing light on, and began. I immediately felt overwhelmed by the impossibility of the task. I wasn’t even sure what I hoped to find.
The front pages of the daily editions of the Haxton Herald-Leader scrolled by, making me dizzy. I worried important information would fly by without my noticing. In the first few minutes, only key words jumped out. “School tax levy” went by a lot. “President Ford” passed a few times. The high school football team, the Haxton Raiders, was apparently off to a good start. I stopped on a few photos, all in black and white. The men wore checked sport coats and wide ties. Most of the women had long straight hair, usually parted in the middle. It didn’t look like just another time; it looked like another planet. Did I really have a sibling who grew up in that world?
I approached the end of the month. Twenty-third, twenty-fourth, twenty-fifth. Maybe I missed it. Or maybe I just needed to keep looking further through the year.
Had anything happened the way people had been telling me?
Both Paul and Gordon Baxter had told me—emphatically—that this Elizabeth Yarbrough woman was a con artist. But was Gordon Baxter one as well? Paul called Gordon a criminal and said he’d been in jail. Were Gordon and Elizabeth working together? The large withdrawals from Mom’s bank account, the appearance of Elizabeth in the will… Was Paul right? Had Mom lost her sharpness and been taken advantage of? Had they played on her intense desire to see her daughter again?
Then something caught my eye. I scrolled past it accidentally since my hand seemed to be moving faster than my brain. I rewound until I saw the page I wanted again.
There it was. A headline read, “Local Teen Missing for Three Days.”
Three days? Did it really take three days for something like this to become a news story?
There were no pictures, just a story I skimmed through. It repeated the same fundamental details Gordon Baxter had told me in McDonald’s. “Fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Baxter went missing from her home… a sophomore at Haxton Senior High… no information about her whereabouts… police aren’t sure whether to call her absence a crime yet.”
What had the police known that they weren’t saying? At that point they would have already talked to Mom and Gordon Baxter. The police would have known about the troubles they were having with Elizabeth. Gordon specifically said they’d mentioned the drugs to the police. How hard were they really looking for her?
I skipped ahead to the next day. No story. And the same for the two days after that. September was over at that point. I reached down and brought out the roll of film for October, switched the reels, and started looking again. On October 1 a longer story ran—and for the first time, I saw a picture of my half sister, Elizabeth.
She looked just like my mother. If I hadn’t known my sister existed, I would have thought it was a portrait of my mother taken when she was a teenager. They shared the same eye and nose shape, the same high forehead. I didn’t know—or care—what Gordon Baxter contributed to the young woman. I saw only my mother. And, yes, even pieces of me. I lifted my hand and brought it to the screen. I touched the image gently, as though I expected some emanation to come through, some information that would explain everything that was going on. But of course it didn’t.
I leaned back a little and read the story. The police reiterated that they weren’t ready to call the missing girl the victim of a crime. In fact, this story reported that the girl’s father, Gordon Baxter, had informed them that the girl was “troubled” and “high-spirited.”
High-spirited? I knew what that meant. It was code for “strong-willed girl.” Not only could Gordon not control his daughter, he couldn’t even begin to understand her. So he labeled her a troublemaker in the newspaper, for all to see. The article ended with Gordon saying, “She started to run with a bad crowd. Maybe she just didn’t want to be here anymore.”
So the consensus had been reached even back then, from her father—Mom wasn’t quoted in the article—as well as the police: Elizabeth Baxter had run away. But Gordon insisted to me that she had been killed, probably by some serial killer the state had put to death. I remembered the name: Rodney Ray Brown.
I took out my phone and searched the Web. I entered “Rodney Ray Brown” along with “Elizabeth Baxter.” Just a few hits came up. One of them was from a Web site devoted to serial killers. A small note at the end of the entry on Brown mentioned that he was suspected in more killings, and it listed Elizabeth’s name as one of the possibilities. Beyond that, little seemed to tie the two together. Brown had killed in Ohio and Indiana during the 1970s. Elizabeth had run off in Ohio during the 1970s. That was about it.
“Who’s that?”
I jumped. Mrs. Porter had managed to sneak up on me and was looking over my shoulder. I reached for the on/off switch.
“Is that your mother?” she asked.
“It’s—”
I don’t know how bad her eyesight was, or whether she just didn’t look closely enough to see the headline, but she patted me on the shoulder and said, “It’s amazing how much you two look alike.”
Chapter Forty-two
My phone rang just as I was leaving the library. My heart jolted. I’d told myself to expect the same shock every time the phone rang while Ronnie was in the hospital. Any call coming in could be good or bad news.
But it wasn’t Paul. Or the hospital. And it wasn’t even Dan.
“Hello?”
“Elizabeth,” he said.
“Who is this?” I asked.
“It’s Gordon Baxter.”
“How did you get this number?” I asked.
“You gave it to me before you left McDonald’s. Remember?”
I thought about it. I might have. Those moments were a blur.
“You were upset when you left, Elizabeth.”
Just hearing him say that name gave me the creeps. He had called his daughter that name all those years ago. He might have even wept while he said that name or dreamed about her and called her name in his sleep. To have him call me by that name—even though it was my name—added a layer of weirdness to the whole enterprise.
“What do you want?”
“I hope your brother is okay,” he said.
“He’s okay.”
I didn’t like the idea of revealing anything to this man about my family, even though it was apparent he already knew far more about my family than I did. In a way, he was part of my family, whether I liked it or not.
“I’m glad to hear it,” he said. His voice sounded oily and insincere, even more than it had in the restaurant. I’d have to wipe the slimy residue of his voice off my ear. “I know our conversation got cut short earlier, so I was just calling to see if you had talked to Paul.”