At least, I think they did. Suddenly, though, as I struggle to see it, I’m not sure. “No?” I ask, wondering if I had missed something there.
But my indecision is short-lived. Of the other, I am entirely sure. “My father didn’t kill her. He was as frantic as any of us looking for her that night on the beach.”
“Sure he was,” Jack says. His head is lowered, eyes on his foot as his heel drills a hole in the sand. “He was afraid she’d wash up with a bullet in her head.”
The image makes me flinch, it’s that vivid. “And where was the blood? The boat was clean.”
His head comes up, eyes on mine. “Boats can be washed. Or maybe he pushed her into the water and shot her there. That’dreallybe clean.”
“You are sick.” I’m about to turn and walk—not run—walk away, when he holds up a conciliatory hand.
“Okay. Maybe it wasn’t that. But put yourself in my shoes. I’ve spent twenty years trying to figure out where she went and why. So forget family. Think business. She founded a company. She loved it more than anything on earth. There’s no way she would deliberately walk away from that, even if it was going downhill—especiallyif it was going downhill.”
“Was it?” I ask. That would be a new twist, though not surprising. Elizabeth had been on the ground floor of electronics, creating a computer in the mid-seventies that was small and powerful. Unfortunately, her company was similarly small. It couldn’t begin to compete with the Apples of the world.
Jack looks like he hadn’t meant to blurt it out. But he isn’t a liar any more than I am. “Yes,” he admits.
“Couldn’t that be a motive?”
“For her to jump ship and leave the mess for someone else to clean up? She wasn’t a quitter.”
“She quit on her family.”
“You can only quit if you’ve signed on, but she never did with us. Know how many business trips she took? How many days at a time she was gone? How many important life events she missed, like birthdays and anniversaries and football playoffs and—” He stopped the list with a sputter. “Besides, where would she go?”
“Margo remembers seeing a second boat—”
“Which the Coast Guard couldn’t find. If Margo saw something, it was a mirage. So where would my mother go?”
“Did you talk with her family?”
Hands on his hips, he faces me straight on. “Of course, I did. I’m not stupid, Mallory.”
I forgive him the tone. “I’m as frustrated as you are.”
“No way.”
“Yes way. What happened to your mother directly impacts my father. You don’t think I’ve wondered for twenty years? You don’t think the not-knowing is part of what kept me away?”
He is quiet.
I sigh. “So. Her family. Any clue?”
“Nah. They were estranged.”
“But she kept their name when she got married.”
“She didn’t want to take my father’s name. Says something right there, y’know? Not that a name ties you to family either way. I used to see cousins when I was a kid, so things were fine at first, but then something happened. I never knew the cause.”
“Did you ask?”
He snorts. Of course, he asked. Jack Sabathian wouldn’t not ask.
“What did they say?”
“Nothing. My mother said nothing. My cousins said nothing. My uncle, Mom’s only sibling, refused to talk with me on the phone, so I tracked him down, went all the way to friggin’ Tallahassee. He refused to talk about it even in person, just him and me, and I badgered. Didn’t get anywhere.”
But he’d made the effort. From the sound of it, he had gone wellbeyond what the local police or my father and his private investigators had done. I have to give Jack credit for that. “I’m sorry. It’d be nice to know.”
