Mariah Stewart - Cry Mercy

Susanna had known Beth well enough to know she'd have slit her wrists before she'd leave Robert without first securing a very comfortable financial cushion, but none of her accounts had been touched. There'd been no contact from kidnappers, and no calls for help. Hospitals from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia had been contacted, but there'd been no patients with amnesia matching Beth's description.

To Susanna's mind, absent any of the alternatives, there was one explanation for their disappearance. Having traveled many of the mountain roads, she could see how easily a Jeep could go off one of those hairpin curves and straight down the mountainside into a ravine without being noticed. There'd been many times when she'd been the only car on the road for several miles. On a Sunday, there was even less traffic. If Beth had become confused, it would have been easy enough for her to get lost. As the roads wound around the mountain, one into the next, she could have gotten turned around in any one of a number of places. Beth had been impatient and impetuous and had unflagging confidence in her own ability to do anything. It was no stretch for Susanna to imagine Beth's certainty that she'd find her way on her own. Add that to unfamiliar roads that had reportedly been icy that morning, and you had the very real possibility that the Jeep had gone over the side at some point, and was still waiting to be found.

Susanna was determined to be the one to find that Jeep, and when she did, Robert would finally be free to move on with his life. Whether he chose to take Susanna with him, well, that remained to be seen. But at least he'd have the truth, and Susanna would be the one who'd found it for him, regardless of what it might cost her in the long run.

She paid for her breakfast and set off on her journey.

We're going to find a new house today,” Chloe sang as she climbed onto the bench seat at the restaurant in the lobby of the hotel where they'd been staying since their arrival in Conroy earlier in the week.

“I don't know if we'll find one, but we are going to look.” Emme turned to the waitress who approached with a coffeepot in one hand and a booster seat in the other. “Good morning, Marjorie. I think we're going with the same old, same old this morning. Unless Chloe wants pancakes instead of waffles.”

“Waffles.” Chloe nodded as Marjorie slid the booster across the seat for her. “And bacon. And juice.”

“Okeydokey.” Marjorie poured coffee into Emme's cup then wrote the order down. “Mom?”

“Just coffee for me, thanks.”

“I'll be back in a jif.”

“She always says that, every day.” Chloe wiggled into the seat. “‘I'll be back in a jif.’”

“She means she'll be back very soon.” Emme fixed her coffee and took a sip. “Jif is short for jiffy.”

“I thought that.” Chloe nodded and rested her elbows on the table. “Will our new house be big?”

“I don't know. I don't think so. I don't think we need a very big house just for the two of us, do you?”

“But we would for us and a dog.”

“We don't have a dog, sweet pea.”

“We could have a dog if we had a house. With a yard.”

“We'll see what houses the Realtor has to show us today. It may take us a while to find something we like, you know.”

“But we could find something we like today.”

“Yes, we could. And in the meantime, we have our nice room upstairs here, and we have Marjorie to be our waitress every morning for breakfast.”

“We're going to look for a new house today,” Chloe told Marjorie as their juice was served.

“You are?” Marjorie wiped up a tiny spill. “Well, I'd certainly miss seeing you every morning, Miss Chloe.”

Inside Emme's bag, her phone began to ring. She retrieved it and held it to one ear and used one hand to cover the other ear to block out the ongoing conversation between her daughter and the waitress.

“Emme? Nick Perone.” Without giving her a chance to return the greeting, he plowed on. “As you suggested, I went through those boxes of Belinda's that the sorority housemother sent a few months ago.”

Emme sat up straight, her interest immediately piqued.

“I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you found something you thought I should know about.”

“If you think the call records from Belinda's old cell phone are something you'd like to know about, then, yeah, I did.”

“I thought the police already had the records for her cell phone.”

“They have the records for the phone she'd been using this year. But she'd gotten a new one last summer. Different model, different carrier.”

“But they transfer the call records when you get a new phone, right?”

“If you keep the same number with the same company. Belinda wanted a new number because she'd been getting calls from a guy she used to go out with who didn't seem to understand what ‘Stop calling me’ means.”

“Wait a minute. Who's this guy? Where is he? Why didn't the chief know about him?”

“The guy is in school in Montana, and she hadn't heard from him since she switched phones, according to Belinda's roommate from last year. She said that the guy wasn't threatening, wasn't abusive, he was just a pain in the butt.”

“Had she told the police about this?”

“The police never contacted her. She opted not to join a sorority, and she and Belinda just drifted apart this year. But she did give me the name of the kid who'd been calling, Clifford Steck.”

“Had she ever mentioned him to you?”

“No. This is the first I've heard of him.”

“I need to call him.”

“I already did. He says he hasn't spoken with Belinda since last June, there's been no contact there at all. Offered to send me copies of his phone bills. And I went one better than just calling Steck. Between last night and this morning, I called every one of the numbers Belinda called or received calls from over the past two years.”

“That's a lot of calls.”

“You're telling me. A lot of the numbers were repeats, some were to college friends, a couple were to old friends from high school, that sort of thing. At first the number of long distance calls seemed odd, but then I remembered that most kids brought cell phones to school that have their home area codes. There were calls to me, to my home, my business, my cell. Several of the numbers had been disconnected. A few may have been wrong numbers. I say may have been because after I dialed and the calls were picked up, I got several versions of the same story. The person who answered the phone insisted they'd never heard of Belinda Hudson. Or they just hung up. Odd, since each of those numbers appeared more than once, and the calls lasted as much as an hour.”

“Maybe someone other than the person who answered had used the phone.”

“I thought of that. Or they were outright lying. Or it could have been someone who'd gotten spooked when the police called the number right after Belinda disappeared.”

“Meaning those numbers were on the phone records for Belinda's new phone as well as the old one. People she contacted last year and was still in contact with up until the time she disappeared.”

“Yeah. Seems like an inordinate number of misdialed calls, but we'll let that go for now. There was one number that appeared several times over a two-week period in April of last year, then not again. I called it last night and got a recording. I called again this morning because I wasn't sure I'd heard the recorded message correctly.”

“What was the message?”

“Thank you for calling Heaven's Gate Fertility Clinic. Our hours are nine AM to six PM…”

“Huh?”

“Yeah. That was my reaction, too. A fertility clinic outside of Reading. I looked it up on the map. It looks as if it's about twenty or thirty miles from where you are. Does that sound right?”