“Right, no. But shedidcall him that night.”
“Eavesdropping?” Zeke turned to her and smiled.
“Definitely not.”
“Sybil.”
“What?”
“Come on,” he said.
“Fine,” she conceded. “Eavesdropping.”
Zeke looked utterly delighted.
“You’re a little drunk,” she added. “We need to be serious. This is serious.”
Zeke put on a stern face and clicked a bunch of buttons, and they landed on the long-ago texts. The last one came in from Las Vegas.
L:Hey, look where I am!
A photo of a young man, scruffy facial hair, a crew cut and oversized jeans and a hoodie that readUSA.
Betty:are u in paris?????
L:Haha, vegas. but it feels like a foreign country.
“Wait!” Zeke grabbed Sybil’s shoulder, then darted out of the room.
Sybil abandoned the phone on the counter and trailed him. She found him on the floor of Betty’s bathroom, the flour tin between his legs. He pried off the lid, then pulled out the stackof postcards. They were blank, so neither Sybil nor Zeke had initially paid them any mind.
Zeke flipped through them until he found the one with the wide-angle shot of the Vegas Strip.
“Voilà,” he said, and handed it to her.
“I didn’t realize these were postmarked.” She sat beside him, and they pressed their backs against the tub. The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC; Fenway Park in Boston; Niagara Falls; Mount Rushmore; the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia; the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland; the Fountains of Bellagio in Vegas; the Four Corners in the Southwest.
“A map, of sorts.”
“But a map of where her brother has already been,” Sybil said. The postmark from Vegas was from nearly a year back. Not so long ago, but a lifetime when you’re looking for someone. The others were a scattershot of months across years. “So I’m not sure how that helps us.”
“This must be how Levi told her where he was,” Zeke said.
“But they had the cell phone. Doesn’t that seem more efficient?”
Zeke dipped his head back, closed his eyes.
“I never snooped on her, obviously. But I can’t remember ever hearing her on her phone. It’s not like she really had friends, now that I think about it. So I think I would have noticed…if she’d been talking to someone.”
“Well, she also obviously knew what she was doing, blending in, shape-shifting of sorts.” Sybil pulled out her own phone now and tapped on Natalie’s text. “Look at her here. She’s…well, she doesn’t look like the Betty we knew.”
They watched the commercial in silence.
“Maybe they agreed to only talk every once in a while. Let’ssay she did burn down that church,” Zeke said. “Or let’s say…maybe Levi did.”
“I think he was gone by then, right? Didn’t she tell us that? That he was the only one who left, who got out?”
“Okay, but hypothetically, let’s think like Julian.” Zeke pushed to his feet, then held out his hand to hoist her up. He didn’t realize until he’d done so that he’d offered her his throwing arm.
