“Wait… here’s something.” Lacy handed me Cathy Peabody’s application. “Her address is listed as a PO box in Richmond.”
Richmond was an hour and a half from Aubergine, but the closest large city.
“Which tells us she could’ve been local. Relatively, anyway.”
I set aside the application for now and pulled out sleeve after sleeve of preserved photos of contestants in their gowns and sashes, all of them featuring one person: Dr. James Bellingham,his arm around a woman’s waist or shoulder. Mr. Finch made an appearance in a few of the photos, including a candid shot in which he wore a blank look, as if someone had caught him unaware.
Another photo had been ripped, effectively decapitating the woman whose sash readMiss 2001, and instead of an arm around her, Dr. Bellingham held her hand like a paramour, their fingers interlaced and woven together.
“Cathy Peabody, I presume.” I held up the image. “Without a head.”
I dropped it next to the stack of pages and reached into the bottom of the box, finding a police report labeled with four words:POI FOUND. CASE DISMISSED.
“What’s a POI?” I asked.
“Person of interest,” Lacy said, without missing a beat. When I looked at her, she shrugged. “I’ve seenSVU.”
“Miss 2001 has been missing for more than two decades, so why would it say she’d been found?” I mumbled, scanning the page. “Okay, here we go: Cathy Peabody was reported missing at seven a.m. on Sunday, July 8, which was the morning after that year’s pageant. Found at eleven a.m. on the same day.” I squinted. “Why would someone report her missing so quickly and why would they—?” I stopped as my eyes fell on the most important piece of information.
“What is it?” Lacy asked when I didn’t finish the sentence.
“She was reported missing because she took something with her.”
“The crown?” Lacy asked, echoing my initial thoughts.
“Yes, but…” I bit my lip. “On July 8, 2001, she also took… four-year-old Savilla Finch.”
TWENTY-THREE
The shock of the discovery didn’t wear off as we continued through the remainder of the boxes, but none of them provided further material on Cathy Peabody, aka the original Miss 2001, or her short-lived kidnapping of Savilla Finch.
As we put everything back how we’d found it and shut the door behind us, my mind kept spinning.
Someone named Cathy Peabody had won the 2001 crown. The morning after her big win, she’d kidnapped Savilla Finch but, a few hours later, the four-year-old had been found at a McDonald’s just outside of town. Mr. Finch hadn’t pressed charges and, according to his ledger that I’d found near the whiskey bottle, he’d paid the kidnapper and original pageant queen for decades. And most—if not all—of this had gone under the public’s radar. It had possibly even been hidden from my aunt, someone who’d dedicated her life to this world.
The Finches were a strange bunch, sure, but this was beyond strange, and the one living person closest to it all—Savilla Finch—would likely have been almost too young to remember.
We made our way into the warm air outside, and the goosebumps on my arm settled as I stood in the sunshine,grateful now for the heat. I took out my phone and searched a variety of terms that included “Cathy Peabody.”
There wasn’t much to find. One catch-all pageant website that looked defunct listed Cathy Peabody as the first and only “de-throned” pageant winner, but provided no relevant personal information. No social media accounts appeared, which wasn’t surprising since Myspace hadn’t even been invented until 2003. I typed in a few new iterations of search terms.
Cathy Peabody, police report
Cathy Peabody, missing
Cathy Peabody, Virginia
Results came up—birth records and obits, but none of them matched the age range she would have been in 2001. When I typed in “2001 Winner of Rose Palace Pageant,” it appeared as if the Internet had been scrubbed of anything—besides the defunct website—that alluded to anyone other than Mrs. Glenda Finch receiving the crown. Mrs. Glenda Finch… but that wouldn’t have been her name in 2001 because she hadn’t yet married, much less dated, Frederick Finch. I searched for her maiden name, but the Internet also seemed to have lost that info.
“What are you thinking?” Lacy asked, looking up from her phone, where she’d been researching the same.
“I’m thinking that Cathy Peabody isn’t this woman’s real name, and that under her fake name, she received some kind of payout from the Finches. Maybe she was blackmailing them.”
Lacy pursed her lips. “Or maybe she had a bone to pick.”
“A lot of people could have something against someone that rich,” I mused.
Lacy and I decided to look around to see if we could find any other info. We poked our heads into the kitchen house, which was dark and dank but empty; then, we started toward the half-hidden structures, only to find trees and overgrowth. We made our way farther into the loblolly pines and red maples, findingwooden boxes that looked as if they were sprouting right out of the ground, like waist-high quadrilateral plants.
