As I sat on the bed, feeling a weariness that came not from fatigue or stress but from the realization that I lived in a world where children could vanish from happy, innocent rooms like this, I reached out and began to sort through the stuffed animals. There were dozens of them on the floor, ranging from bears to rabbits, with a special emphasis on kittens.
I turned a few of them over, squeezed them, felt their softness, and looked into their unblinking plastic eyes as if they could tell me something. Several of the animals were wearing outfits; some made noises when you squeezed them; others had movable limbs. One scholarly bear was wearing glasses and had a plastic piece of chalk in one paw and a plastic chalkboard tucked under his arm. I pulled the bear closer and saw that the chalkboard was the cover for a small booklet that closed with a snap. I slid the booklet out from where it was tucked under the bear’s paw, opened it, and discovered the little book was a diary. The first entry, in a woman’s writing, read: “Merry Christmas, Betsy! Love, Mom and Dad.”
I flipped through the rest of it. The pages were filled with a child’s drawings and writing. There were quite a few stick figures, lots of hearts, and the name Betsy, all done with various colors of crayon. Every now and then she wrote a few crudely constructed sentences. “Mom made me soop and greeled cheese,” read one entry. There were maybe five or six entries for each month. On every page she’d used, the girl had carefully written the date. Her spelling of “April” was perfect, but “February” had given her fits. I continued turning pages until I reached the last entry. It had been made on March fourth, the day before Weston’s body was found and the search for Betsy Weston and her mother became the city’s hottest news story.
Joe poked his head in the door. “The bedroom was a waste. You got anything worth looking at?”
I didn’t turn around. “They’re alive, Joe.”
“Excuse me?”
“Betsy Weston wrote this in her diary the night she disappeared,” I said.
Joe crossed the room and knelt beside me, then read the diary entry, written in a child’s scrawl with a green crayon: Tonite I said goodby.
CHAPTER 7
“TONIGHT I said goodbye.” Joe read it aloud and then raised his eyes and looked at me. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means she knew she was leaving,” I said.
“That’s a beautiful thought,” he said. “But you don’t have much evidence to base it on.”
“She wrote something, or drew something, every day this year, Joe. On the night she and her mother disappear, she writes this, and you don’t think it means anything?”
He looked at the entry again, then sighed, his eyes thoughtful. “I’m not saying it doesn’t mean anything. I’m just wondering how she possibly could have known to write it. Said goodbye to what? Her house or her dad?”
“Or both,” I said.
“Keep the book,” Joe said. “But don’t let the old man see it. The last thing we want is for him to be any more convinced they’re alive.”
We left the house and checked the garage. A Toyota sport utility vehicle and a Lexus remained, as well as a collection of tools and more toys. Julie Weston and her daughter hadn’t left in one of the family cars. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t have left alive.
We returned to John Weston and gave him the key.
“Find anything helpful?” he asked.
Joe and I exchanged a glance, then Joe said, “Just seeing the home is helpful, Mr. Weston.”
He looked at Joe blankly and didn’t respond. We left, promising to be in touch. When I pulled out of the driveway he was still sitting on the table. I wondered if he’d be there all day.
“Well,” Joe said as I drove, “that wasn’t much help. You think they’re alive now, because of one sentence written in a little girl’s diary. And, while I respect that hunch, it still isn’t any help in finding them.”
“No,” I admitted, “it isn’t.” I pulled onto Brecksville Road and headed north, back toward the city, following roughly the same path the Cuyahoga River takes as it winds its way toward the heart of downtown and into the Flats. The sun was out, and the digital thermometer on the rearview mirror said it was forty-seven degrees outside—not warm enough for me, but the warmest it had been in months. The winter was still clinging to us, refusing to give in to the spring. It had been a long, nasty one, with nearly a hundred inches of snowfall and consistently low temperatures that felt even colder with the frigid winds that whipped in off the lake. Around the first of March it had begun to wear at me. I was annoyed by the lingering traces of snow now, irate at each forecast of another storm, frustrated with the way the cold air squeezed my lungs on every run.
“Next move?” Joe said, interrupting my thoughts. I took my eyes off the van in front of me briefly and glanced at him, not understanding.
“You spacing out on me?” he said. “What do you think our next move should be?”
I returned my eyes to the road and shrugged. “I don’t know. We’ve got some possibilities now, but no facts, nothing close to hard evidence. Seems to me we need to shake something up a little, see what we can stir up.”
“That sounds about right,” Joe said. “You’ve always favored the loose cannon approach in the past.”
I smiled. “When in doubt, shoot it out.”
“Brilliant slogan.” He shook his head. “So, who are we going to shake up? You want to find the Russians, take a bat to their car?”
“Have to save something for tomorrow,” I said. “I figured we’d start with Jeremiah Hubbard.”
“Take a bat to his car?”
“Only if he refuses to see us.”
Joe twisted in the seat, looking to see if I was serious. “You really want to talk to Hubbard today?”
“Why not? He—or his associates, if we want to be anal about it—were paying Weston to do something recently. That’s about the only thing close to a fact we have. Might as well take it and run with it.”
“You assume he’ll be so awed by our deductive abilities that he’ll confess ties to the Russian mob and let us make a citizen’s arrest?”
“It’s hard to say what his reaction will be,” I said. “But it’s even harder to imagine someone not being awed by our deductive abilities.”
Joe ran his hand through his short gray hair and let it keep going until it was on the back of his neck. He sighed and kneaded the flesh as if trying to drive out a pain that had lodged there.
“Shit,” he said. “It’s not like I’ve got any better ideas. Besides, I’ve always wanted to meet Hubbard.”
“You know where his office is?”
He nodded. “Right downtown. Has a wide window that looks out from the Terminal Tower, or something like that.”
“Beautiful. I’m sure he’d be happy to show us the view.”
“Man that rich? He’s got nothing but free time.”
A quick check in the phone book confirmed Joe’s memory; Hubbard’s offices were in the Terminal Tower downtown. It is unquestionably the city’s most famous building. Once the tallest building in the city—and second tallest in the world—it is now dwarfed by the Key Building. The Terminal Tower has a presence the city’s other skyscrapers lack, though, regardless of their size. Offices in the building went for exorbitant amounts, and I was sure Hubbard’s suite would be among the priciest.
Once downtown, I pulled into the Tower City garage and maneuvered the truck into a parking space that had obviously been designed for something more like a Geo Metro or a Honda Civic. Then we headed into the building. We found a directory in the lobby and determined the offices of Jeremiah Hubbard Enterprises were located on the thirty-second floor of the fifty-two-story building.