“Yeah right,” Bette spat.
“I’d better get going. I just wanted to let you guys know what we’d found,” Hart told them.
“Thank you, Officer.” Homer stood and extended his hand.
Hart shook it.
Bette followed him onto the porch.
“Hart,” she said.
He turned back to her, clearly wanting to rush to his car and escape the despair oozing out from the Childs’ home.
“Can we talk? Just for a minute?” She gestured toward the porch, where a rocking chair and a swing sat.
He wanted to say no. She saw it in his face, but he gave a tight nod and walked to the rocking chair.
He sat in the chair, both feet planted on the ground as if he preferred stability rather than the uneasy swaying of the chair.
Bette opted for the porch swing. It rocked forward and back — the cyclical movement, like everything - reminded Bette of her sister.
Crystal had spoken often of cycles, the in and out breath, the rise and fall of the sun, the highs and lows of emotion. Crystal loved the shift from one end to another, the ever-swinging pendulum.
Bette felt just the opposite. Crystal’s disappearance had left no great rift in the fabric of the world. People carried on. Even those who loved Crystal continued to get up, put on their socks, drink their coffee and go off to work. Why hadn’t the whole world slid to the edge alongside Bette?
How did everyone else do it? Even the tiniest thing, the in and out breath, had become near impossible.
“Do you think he killed her?” Bette asked.
He took a long time to answer.
“I don’t know, Bette. And I’m not just saying that because I’m a cop and I’m not supposed to assume anything. Sometimes you meet a perpetrator and in your guts you’re sure he’s guilty. Other times, you think you’ve met the husband of the year only to find out he’s been beating his wife for a decade, and strangled her a week ago, despite crying at press conferences and begging for her abductor to bring her home. People are unpredictable and if their own skin is on the line, they can become very convincing. I don’t have a gut feeling about Weston as a killer. But everything we’ve found…” He trailed off.
“Makes him look like a killer,” she finished.
“It doesn’t look good. I’ll say that,” Hart agreed.
“Crystal’s always been the brighter daughter,” Bette began. “Not brains wise, though she is smart. But brighter in light. Her light has sometimes made me feel kind of small. Insignificant, maybe.”
Bette touched a strand of her hair and then lifted it, gazing at the dark color, void of light.
“Do you think one daughter is always less compared to the other?” she wondered out loud. “All the things I’ve coveted in Crystal’s life are phantoms. The beautiful men are ugly on the inside. The bright clothes wrinkle and fade with time. The feelings that ignite poetry die. All of it is temporary. Some of it is not even real at all.”
Hart didn’t look at Bette as she talked.
“I don’t think one sister is always less,” he said. “Different, but not less. I have three siblings, in some ways we’re similar. In others, we’re like aliens from different planets and that’s good. Right? We’re meant to be different. Snowflakes and all that.”
“Snowflakes,” Bette laughed, and the laughter cut deep because Crystal had loved snowflakes.
She’d gone through a phase somewhere in her teen years when she talked of snowflakes constantly. She studied them on the windowpanes. She lay in the yard on freezing cold days and watched them fall one after another and pillow on her long dark eyelashes.
Bette would run out, join her for half a minute and then race back inside to warm up.
She’d never had Crystal’s devotion, her strength, her willingness. Crystal was all in. That’s how Lilith had once described her. She was all in on life for every single hand.
“Are you going to arrest him?” Bette asked.
Hart stood and offered her a sympathetic smile. “Not yet, but I promise you’ll be the first to know.”
He said nothing more as he walked down the driveway and climbed into his car.
22
Then
“Great to meet you, Crystal. I’m Dan. Your dashing, daring and deviant tour guide for this Michigan Mayhem Adventure.”
Dan grabbed Crystal’s duffel bag and hoisted it into the back of the Michigan Mayhem van.
Dan was tall, six foot five at least, with tanned skin and sun-bleached hair that hung past his collar. He had big brown eyes, a wide smile and an energy toward which Crystal would have previously gravitated. He was just her type.
Instead, as he flirted, she thought of Weston.
A German shepherd jumped from the passenger seat of the tour van and ran over to lick Crystal’s hand.
“Hey there, Willy, how are you today?” she asked, rubbing the dog’s scruffy neck.
“Whoa, how d’you know his name?” Dan asked, holding his hand out for the dog to lick.
Crystal paused.
She’d simply known it. The dog’s name was Willy after the character in Willy Wonka.
“Tags,” she offered, tugging on the dog’s collar. She had no idea if the dog had a nametag, but assumed so.
Four other people had signed up for the trip. Two middle-aged couples. The husbands worked together at a large insurance company downtown and their wives had been planning the trip for months.
“Why don’t you ride up front with me?” Dan asked, flashing her his gorgeous lopsided smile.
She nodded, grabbing her notebook and climbing in to the seat.
Willy bounded in through the back, laying on the floor between them.
Dan closed the door and leapt into the driver’s seat.
As he started to pull from the parking lot, Crystal jumped as a hand pounded on her passenger side window.
She turned to find Wes, hair messy, eyes gleaming, standing outside the van.
She didn’t roll down the window. She pushed open the door and jumped into his arms.
“I cancelled everything. I signed up. I’m going,” he announced.
He waved his ticket at Dan in the driver’s seat.
Dan turned off the engine and climbed out, examining Wes’s ticket.
“You guys know each other?” Dan asked, looking slightly crestfallen as he glanced back and forth between them.
Wes put an arm around Crystal’s waist, lifting her.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered in her ear.
She looked at him, his eyes telling her everything she needed to know.
“I love you,” she murmured, realizing she had spoken the words after they’d already slipped out.
His eyes widened, and he leaned his forehead against hers.
“I love you too. I love you so much it hurts.”
“Guess you guys are in the third row,” Dan interrupted, pointing toward the back of the van. “Willy, you get to ride shotgun after all.”
Crystal hoisted herself onto the cliff ledge, skipping across the hard, uneven surface. She paused at the edge, waiting for Wes to catch up.
When he climbed to the top of the cliff, he paused, craning his neck forward.
“I don’t know,” he murmured. “That cliff down there looked safer.”
Dan climbed behind him, muscular and agile. He reached the edge in two long strides.
“Epic fall, baby,” he said to Crystal as he stepped backwards to the ledge and jumped.
Crystal watched him fall, feet first, arms and legs straight. He shot into the water like a bullet.
She turned back to Wes, ready to talk him into the jump, but he took off, running head down toward the edge.