“Yep.” Zeke tapped the lid, which was dented on top. “It’s definitely not mine. Which means that it has to be hers.”
Zeke held it out to her, as if she needed to be the one to do the honors, see for herself. She pried off the lid.
One photo of Betty and her family. Betty was a little older than in the picture that Simone had shared, maybe early teens. Her face had lost some of the baby fat but wasn’t nearly the straight edge of the young woman they knew now. An unfamiliar man stood beside Patience, who had a round belly at least six or seven months along. There were two other new women in the family picture too. They wore dark dresses that buttoned up to their necks, their hair in French braids. At their feet were a smattering of young children.
“That must be Matthew,” Sybil said, tapping the photo with her index finger. “Patience’s husband. The new pastor.”
“Yes, and those must be her brothers’ wives,” Zeke said, pointing out the other women, each with frozen smiles and hands on the shoulders of the toddlers.
“And that”—Sybil tapped twice on a young man with dark eyes, jet-black hair and a pained expression but with no wife beside him—“must be our elusive Levi.”
“Well, speaking of that…” Zeke lifted a worn-out Bible from the box to reveal an old flip phone beneath. Now Sybil audibly gasped, and Zeke, despite the circumstances, found himself delighted. “It’s dead, obviously. And I haven’t had this type of charger since 1998, but I think I found one on Amazon.”
Sybil popped the phone open, pressed a few buttons, then flipped it closed. Just to be sure.
“And that’s not all,” Zeke said.
He opened the Bible and thumbed through until he found what he was looking for.
There, in the middle of Psalms 118, Betty had written:
I can’t wait to ruin you. I can’t wait to see the surprise on your face when I tell you it was me.
41
Night Sixteen
Sybil
December 23rd
Sybil had tapedthe new family photo on their evidence wall along with the torn-out page of the Bible, which she realized was possibly evidence tampering, but it wasn’t like they were about to call the police and let them know what they found. She thought about contacting Simone to see if she had any insights, but Simone hadn’t replied to her last text, checking in, asking if there were anything Sybil could do. They hardly knew Julian’s daughter, but she was a little stung all the same.Let me mother you, she wanted to say. Old habits die hard.
The plug for the flip phone—shipping from overseas—would arrive tomorrow, so for now, all they could do was wait. In the meantime, Sybil scoured the internet for wedding announcements about Betty’s brothers, any information on their wives.
“You think that has anything to do with it?” Zeke asked.
It was the middle of the night again, which meant that it was almost Christmas Eve. Sybil had presents for Eloise back at the house, but she’d barely heard from her daughter since dropping her at the pied-à-terre to stay with Mark, and she wasn’tinterested in racing to their house in the suburbs and depositing hundreds of dollars of wrapped Lululemon gear at her daughter’s feet. She thought briefly of that unadorned, naked tree sitting in the middle of her living room, and her heart panged for the way that things used to be, for the way that her life had pretty much detonated this past year.
“I don’t even know what theitis that we’re looking for,” Sybil said.
“I think theitis if Betty burned down her father’s church. And if for some reason, now, a couple of years later, that made her run when Julian figured out who she was.”
Zeke picked up an elastic exercise band and started doing one of his rehab exercises. Sybil had done her stupid back stretches, but the throb of her shoulder never relented; it was just there all the time now, like her body wanted to remind her what it really needed was the thing she couldn’t give it: rest. But she did her stretches all the same alongside Zeke. They’d learned to be productive in their waking hours, interminable as those hours were.
Sybil opened Julian’s folder again, which still had a few scraps of paper that they hadn’t made heads or tails of. “Was he actually looking to, like, charge Betty for…oh my god, this sounds preposterous, but was he actually looking to charge her with murder? Or was he just…” She flipped through some of the pages. “It seems like he was more interested in her father’s corruption.” She pulled a printed email out and rose to tape it on the wall, after initially thinking it wasn’t relevant. “Like, I didn’t really think much of this, but why was Julian so interested in the increase in church membership?”
“Read me what he said,” Zeke said. He’d tied the elastic band to the door handle of the pantry and was working on his range of motion. Sybil felt like they were in an old-school copshow. This camaraderie was what she missed most after abandoning her medical career. Examining a patient’s symptoms, pinpointing a cause, figuring out the fix. Maybe she hadn’t really been all that interested inhelpingother people’s ailments; maybe she’d just been high on the chase for the cure. If she stopped to consider this, she realized, she’d lose her equilibrium. All this time, she’d been angry, resentful of Mark for upending the career she’d thought she was rightfully owed, but what if it wasn’t the career she’d needed, just the thrill of the hunt?
Sybil read Julian’s email aloud.
R—
I know you think this is a dead-ender, but I pulled up their financials. The Revivalist Church was taking in well over 3.2 mill for the past two years, double what it was doing before. Which is still a shit-ton, tax free, for this sort of thing. I know we’ve closed this case, but come on, man, this doesn’t make sense. Also, look at the enrollment rolls: Did they rope in half of the county? Are they actively recruiting? I admit that I’m not a churchgoer, but for a midsized rural congregation just a few years ago, this thing looks like a Florida megachurch. I think there are a lot of reasons Pastor Aaron Jones might have wound up dead. We shouldn’t exclude any of them, in my opinion. Isn’t this all a little odd?
“Jesus Christ,” Zeke said. His arm was hovering in midair, like he had been too stunned to complete his rep, and Sybil noted the perfect arc of his bicep, the way his forearm was solid muscle, how his skin was a golden tan that Eloise would kill forduring one of their Caribbean vacations that they used to take before Mark started fucking the anesthesiologist. “So this is amoneything, not awe marry off women at eighteen and seem totally unhingedsort of thing?”
“I want to find someone down there to talk to,” she said. “I feel like whatever went on with the fire is going to lead us back to Betty.” She eased back onto the breakfast nook bench, tapped her laptop awake.
