“A child has gone missing,” Javi said. “If you impede this investigation—”
Betsy snapped her chin up. “Alice didn’t have anything to do with that,” she said. “She’s not even in Plenty.”
Sean snorted. “I thought you hadn’t seen her in years.”
Javi twisted around to level a cold look at the ex-cop. He didn’t need help from a private investigator with a suspiciously nice location and a suspiciously expensive house. “Mr. Stokes, I can manage.”
They traded not entirely friendly looks for a second, and then Sean shrugged and spread his hands. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to tread on your toes, Special Agent Merlo.”
“It was a good question, though,” Javi said as he refocused on Betsy. “When was the last time you saw Alice?”
“Three, four years ago,” Betsy said. “She took off with this woman she’d met, some do-gooder with a whole bunch of fancy ideas. Turned out… snotty cow actually did some good. Alice got clean. Alice got a job. Alice don’t want anything to do with me. I don’t blame her. She sends letters sometimes. No return address.”
Javi tilted his head curiously to the side. “No offense, Ms. Murney, but I assumed you were homeless.”
“I sleep in my car, up in Groves,” she said. “But Tranq helps me out. He stores my old clothes, keeps letters for me. Alice sends her letters there.”
“Tranq?”
It had apparently been long enough, and Sean had gotten bored behaving himself. “Tranquil Reed… at the Retreat,” he said. “Betsy used to clean for him, didn’t you, Betsy?”
She gave a dirty look. “Not many other jobs around here, back then,” she said. “Man gave me a place to live, some money under the table….”
“You harvested and cured weed for him,” Sean said. “He wasn’t helping you out of the goodness of his heart.”
Javi held up his hand and pointed back over his shoulder to tell Sean to be quiet. “Did Alice work at the Retreat too?”
Betsy nodded uncertainly. She scraped her hair back from her face with both hands until she could knot it behind her head. It pulled the skin tight across her temples and made the blue veins visible under the skin. Her hands trembled as she worked. “Lot of us did, back then,” she said. “The hippies were nice people. Didn’t ask too many questions, fed everyone. You were supposed to meditate every morning, but lots of us just napped. After they left, Tranq tidied it up. He said I could stay if I kept myself clean, and I did. For a while. It was Alice that couldn’t. We got kicked out, and I didn’t see any point in not drinking. Then she left, and I kept drinkin’. Like I said, she got married, and she got clean and straight, and she’s never coming back here. Certainly not to snatch some kid.”
She shifted on the couch, leather creaking, and itched at the back of her hands in distraction. Her attention kept slipping over Javi’s shoulder, back to the bottle Sean was minding. Javi put his hand on her knee.
“Betsy, when you were living up at the Retreat, do you remember a boy called Hector? Hector Andrews? He’d have been around the same age as your daughter.”
She pressed her lips together as she thought and thumped one hand at her temples as though she could jostle it out that way. It didn’t budge. She shook her head hesitantly.
“There were a lot of people,” she said. “My memory ain’t what it was.”
“He’d have been friends with your daughter. Or spent time with her.”
A ghost of maternal pride and shame slid over Betsy’s face. “My girl was pretty, Agent Merlo. Lots of boys wanted to spend time with her. Men too. Maybe I should have kept more of them away.” Her gaze drifted again, and she licked her lips. “Can I have a drink? My mouth’s dry as the wind out there.”
“In a minute,” Javi said. He shifted to block her view of the bottle and hold on to her attention. The gravity of the investigation was shifting. All he needed was a few more answers from Betsy. “Do you remember nearly six years ago? Alice was still in town then, wasn’t she?”
Betsy nodded slowly. A confused frown creased her forehead. “Yeah,” she said slowly. “I remember. She had a bad trip, took her forever to put Alice back together out of it. Voices. She said she could hear me thinking. Said I hated her.”
“Why?”
“Because she was an addict?” Betsy lifted her shoulders in a tired shrug. “Because she knew I was going down with her? Because I was not a good mother?”
“Not why did you think she hated you,” Javi said. “Why did she think it?”
The frown deepened. Betsy chewed her lower lip and picked at the dry skin with her teeth until it bled. “I don’t know. It was all broken—sense and nonsense shaken together. She said that we knew what she’d done, that everyone knew what she’d done, but then she wouldn’t tell me what it was. Whatever it was, she probably did it for a hit. Us addicts would do anything for a hit of what ails us. Can I have a drink? I’m thirsty.”
Javi had more questions. He usually did. But the well had gone dry. Betsy might have the information he needed in her head, but she didn’t know it was the answer to his questions.
He rocked back on his heels and onto his feet. Halfway up he stopped to brush the carpet lint and dust from his knee. “Give her a drink, Stokes,” he said.
“I’ve got water in the fridge,” Sean said. “Still and sparkling. I think it’s lemon flavored.”
