David Bell - Never Come Back

“What did Mom do?” I asked.

“We did what any parent would do,” he said. “We sat her down and we confronted her. We told her, in no uncertain terms, that she was not to bring that kind of thing into our house ever again. We laid down the law, the way parents are supposed to in a case like that.” His voice took on a firmness, a conviction that hadn’t been there before. It sounded like these were the words he truly believed. “You know, back then parents were much more comfortable laying down the law like that. We could say to a child, ‘It’s my way or the highway.’ It was a better way to raise a child.”

“Did you try to get her help?” I asked.

“Help?” he said, his voice dismissive. “We didn’t used to believe people with drug problems needed help. We used to believe in an application of will. If the kid couldn’t do it, then the parents did. I still believe that.”

“She was fifteen,” I said. “Don’t you think she deserved a break?”

“I knew her,” he said, his voice cold. “She was my daughter. I knew how to raise her.”

I sensed a dead end, a point at which Gordon Baxter and I were not going to agree. And I really didn’t care to push him—I hadn’t come for a debate about parenting styles. I wanted to learn about my mother’s life.

“So what happened?” I asked.

“She ran away,” he said.

“I thought you said—”

“She came back,” he said. “She was gone for a few days, probably crashing at a friend’s house. Or God knows where. It drove your mother crazy with worry. I don’t think Leslie slept the whole time Beth was gone. When Beth came back, things just got worse. She was skipping school. Coming home late. If we grounded her, she snuck out.” He sighed. “One night the police brought her home. She had snuck out and gone to a party. When the police broke up the party, they found out Beth was underage, and they brought her home to us. What could be worse for a parent than to have the police bring your child home in the middle of the night?”

“I’m guessing the murder part was worse,” I said.

He studied me from across the table, his eyes growing flat and glassy. I imagined having him for a father was a laugh riot. I suspected that if he could get away with it he probably would have slapped me right there in McDonald’s.

“Children shouldn’t talk to adults like that either,” he said, his eyes still flat. “It shouldn’t matter whether the adult is your parent or not.”

“I suspect you and I have some philosophical differences that we really can’t solve here. Do you want to tell me the rest of your story?”

“Aren’t you going to remind me of my time limit again?” he asked.

I looked at my watch. “You have twenty-five minutes left.”

Gordon sipped his coffee and didn’t say anything for a long moment. I started to wonder whether he was going to go on with his story at all, or whether he’d decided he’d had enough of me. Then he cleared his throat.

“She disappeared one night,” he said. “She went out with friends. We let her go out that night. You mom did anyway. Leslie thought like you, I suppose. She thought if you loosened the reins a little bit things might get better. So Beth went out one night with her friends and she never came back. At first, we thought she had just run away again. If someone does something like that once, then it’s certainly likely they would do it again. But after a few days when she didn’t return, we started to think something really had gone wrong. Maybe she had overdosed. Maybe she’d been taken against her will. So we finally called the police.”

“After a few days?”

“It’s easy to judge, isn’t it?” he said. “Especially with the hindsight of—what, thirty-seven years?” He let that sink in for a moment. Then he said, “The police investigated the disappearance. They talked to her friends and all of that. People at school. They didn’t find anything, nothing that would tell them what happened to her. Pretty quickly, they seemed to turn their attention to other things.”

“But a fifteen-year-old girl?” I said. “How could they just let her go so easily?”

“Like I said, it was a different time. People didn’t get all weepy over missing kids the way they do now. Kids weren’t the center of the world.”

“She could have been in danger,” I said. “She was in danger.” I found myself getting worked up over what seemed to me an injustice. This was my sister, my family. It must have ripped my mother’s heart out. How could anyone let such a thing happen? So casually? “You said she was murdered. Did they at least convict the guy responsible?”

“No,” he said.

“No?”

“They didn’t convict anybody,” he said, shaking his head. “They never even found her body.”

“Then how—?”

“The police decided she had run away again,” Gordon said. “We told them about the drugs, about the wild crowd. Kids from the town and the college ran off from time to time. They’d come back, but their parents would be worried sick. But it happened. This was before the Internet, remember. Before CNN. Before all those crime shows on cable TV. Kids ran away, and the police let them go.”

“But you say she was murdered.”

“A police officer gave me his theory once,” he said. “It was off the record, of course. Just something he’d concluded on his own. Are you familiar with the name Rodney Ray Brown?”

I shook my head.

“He’s a serial killer. Was a serial killer. They executed him in 1984 in Ohio. Apparently, Brown was in Haxton around the time Beth disappeared. He ran with some girl whose grandmother lived there. There’s no proof he committed the crime, and the police aren’t even sure he was here the day Beth disappeared. But Brown liked certain kinds of girls. He liked them young—high school age—and he liked them with long dark hair. That’s Beth.” He paused. “I think he got her.”

“But he wasn’t charged in her death?” I asked.

“Never. They convicted him of killing six other girls. There are other murders and disappearances they suspect him of, but we’ll never know for sure. He took those secrets with him.”

I sat back in my chair. The couple with the baby had gone, and a group of teenagers, probably the same age as my dead half sister, took their place. They all held phones and talked and texted while they ate. I felt overloaded by the things Gordon told me, as if a great gust of wind had come at me suddenly, knocking me onto my butt.

I had questions. Lots of questions.

But one rose to the top of my mind.

“Why exactly are you telling me all of this?” I asked.

He worked his tongue around in his mouth. I saw it bulging against his cheek. Then he said, “I thought you’d want to understand what happened to your half sister, especially since I know your mother hadn’t told you about it. I also wanted to make sure you understood some things about my relationship with your mother. I wanted you to know that even though we weren’t together and hadn’t been for quite a number of years, we still shared something.”

“The memory of your daughter,” I said.

“The memory. The pain. The bond that created.”

“But if you were so important to her, why didn’t she ever tell me about you? You said you were in touch with her right up until she died. How do I know that’s true? Or are you just going to tell me to ask Paul?”

“No,” he said. “Not that. Your mother had been… helping me recently. From time to time over the past year or so.”

“Helping with what?”

“My life hasn’t been the same since Beth died. I never really had my feet on the ground again. Losing a child, it’s… it’s just something I never could have imagined. Things never went right after that.” He looked me right in the eye. “I was glad your mom found someone else and had more kids. It was tough seeing her that way, but I knew she’d moved on. Maybe that’s why she didn’t tell you about it.”