Two of the text threads on Beatrice’s phone were truncated and populated with the lingo of teens and tweens. Nicole recognized most of it because her son used it when he texted her. One of the threads was a conversation between the vic and her brother Joaquin, some sharp words, some soft, much of it about their father. The other thread held the cloying language of pubescent love. There were bold statements of emotions from a boy named Kenny and bitter words of disappointment when they weren’t returned by Beatrice.
I want you, Bea. As my girl. I want you in every way, to be mine …
We’re friends, Kenny. Friends only …
The thread deteriorated with: That’s bullshit … we were never friends … For me, it’s all or nothing …
And ended with a plea from the vic: Friends, please.
If they were looking at date rape turned murder, Kenny made the top of their list as a person of interest.
Rather than a profile picture for Kenny, Beatrice had inserted an internet image of a sword stuck in stone. Nicole stopped and pondered a moment. Her mythology was weak, but she had an eleven-year-old son who enjoyed the King Arthur and the Round Table tales. And she wanted to hear his voice anyway.
“Hey, Mom.” Even bored, he lifted her mood.
“How’s it going with Mrs. Neal?”
“We’re making caramel corn,” he reported, and his tone made it clear that it was as much fun as watching grass grow.
Last week it had been Christmas cookies. Snowmen and Santas. “In a few weeks it’ll be chocolate cherry fudge.” In honor of Valentine’s Day. Jordan loved the stuff. “I have a question. King Arthur and his sword.” She laid it out for him.
“Excalibur,” Jordan said.
“Which is what exactly?”
“The name of his sword. Really, Mom, you should at least know that.”
“Of course I should,” she agreed. “So, didn’t he have to pull it out of a stone?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Related to a case,” she returned. “Why did he have to pull it out of a stone? There’s some significance there, right?”
“Only a ton.”
“Enlighten me, and I’ll tell you all about it when I can.”
There was only a slight pause, and then Jordan said, “Only the true king could pull the sword from the stone. It was a test. A lot of people tried, but only Arthur succeeded, and that’s how he became king.”
“And that’s it?”
“Are you kidding? That sword is, like, the most important part of the Arthurian tales. It gives Arthur power and position. It’s capable of magic.”
“What kind of magic?”
“Well, it protected Arthur, until Morgan le Fay stole it.”
“And then what happened?”
“Arthur died.” She could hear the shrug in Jordan’s voice. “That’s the short version.”
“What happened to the sword?”
“It was thrown back into the lake.”
“Really?”
“Always,” he confirmed. “Doesn’t matter who’s telling the story, the sword of a knight is always thrown back into the lake. Why? Did you find a sword?”
“No.” But it was interesting, the lake connection. She doubted that Beatrice had been out there looking for a mythical sword. Still, it teased Nicole’s mind with the possibility of connection.
“If you think of anything else I should know about it, call.”
“’Kay. Are you coming home soon?”
“Not until late. I’ll call before you go to bed.” It was the best she could do. There were many tasks to be done before she could think about food or sleep. “Mrs. Neal is making beef stroganoff for dinner.”
“I know. And then it’s checkers or backgammon.”
Nicole’s smile grew at his quiet disgust. “Visiting hours at the nursing home?” Although Mrs. Neal was a square fifty years old.
“I like her.”
“I know you do.”
“I don’t like board games.”
“She’s trying.”
“Yeah.”
And he’d put up with it because he really did like Mrs. Neal, and he couldn’t bring himself to swat a fly.
“She’s a comfort to me,” Nicole admitted.
“I know.”
“Thanks.”
“For putting up with a grandma?”
“For treating her like one.”
Nicole disconnected and returned to the text messages on Beatrice’s phone. She did a quick internet search. Beatrice had given Kenny the icon of a sword from one of the best-known romances in literature and film. Excalibur was symbolic of many things: strength and weakness, life and death. The list was exhaustive. So Nicole moved on to extrapolation. Had Beatrice seen herself as a Morgan le Fay—a young woman of mystery, capable of shape-shifting and even manipulation? In many tales, le Fay was portrayed as a heroine, in others as a woman who used her beauty and sexual allure to defeat her foes. Which of those qualities had Beatrice seen in herself? What was she to Kenny: ally or adversary?
And who was Kenny? A classmate? A friend from home? There had been passion in his words, a shared affection in the thread, and Nicole felt comfortable ruling him out as a new acquaintance. And yet the last series of messages referred to a meet on the Diamond Run on December 22nd. A done deal, because Kenny had “enjoyed the ride” with her.
Kenny was here, in Montana, but who was he? That and the shoe size would drive her visit with the Esparzas this afternoon.
Beatrice had kept up a running conversation with her brother. The first message was dated December 16th:
We’re not going. Dad keeps driving.
No response from Joaquin. A few minutes later, Beatrice tried again:
Like we’re on one of those racetracks. Round and round. He won’t stop.
Silence. Then two minutes later:
Mom isn’t picking up her phone. Beatrice punctuated it with a sad-faced, crying emoji.
Joaquin didn’t respond. The vic had waited six minutes before another attempt:
I want to come home.
What’s your contribution? he’d written back, and the words stirred something elemental in Nicole. They weren’t a threat but felt like one. She could hear the challenge, or the sarcasm, in his tone. That was one of the problems when conversations were conducted electronically—tone was always an assumption.
Too much. Too soon.
Lab rats have no say, Joaquin wrote.
The vic’s response was another emoji, this time the classic heart breaking in two.
The thread grew cold, and then on Christmas morning, Joaquin wrote her: You want to do this?
Dad’s counting on me.
Joaquin didn’t respond.
Then at 10:20 Christmas night, Beatrice wrote her final text. An appeal to her brother. SOS.
When they should have been watching the movie and drinking hot chocolate brewed in the coffeepot.
The timing was good. It fell within MacAulay’s time-of-death window.
Had Joaquin ignored his sister’s plea for help? Or had he acted on it? Nicole thought about the condition in which she’d found the family just six hours after Beatrice’s final attempt at contact. All of them had been wide-eyed, tense, expecting the worst. Except Joaquin. He had seemed to know the situation was bad but believed all was not lost.
The two remaining threads were messages from Beatrice’s parents.
The mother had written many unanswered messages dating back to December 20th and ending Christmas afternoon. Most were along the lines of family plans: We’re leaving for dinner at … or Your sisters would like to ski with you … Others were corrective. Eerily, the first and last messages were the same: Good girls don’t do this.
But what had the vic been doing that upset her mother? It wasn’t stated, but known. Mother and daughter had their opinions on it, equally strong.
The father had sent one message to his daughter, early evening Christmas Day: Cooperate. A single word that managed to stir the hairs on Nicole’s nape. Cooperate. With whom? Esparza? Why would he need her cooperation? With the people holding her captive? Either was equally possible. As were a number of other less-than-nefarious possibilities. But she would be a fool to ignore the obvious.
She sent a text to Lars. They were going back to the Huntington Spa, and they weren’t leaving without answers. Then she returned to her exploration of Beatrice’s cell phone, hoping to find further implication. The most promising app was a digital diary, but it was locked. Nicole sent an email to forensics, indicating that they should attend to this first.
Nicole put the cell phone aside and picked up the slim diary. The one the vic had used solely for sport. She fanned through it and realized there were as many words as there were numbers. She opened to the first page. It was an accounting of that day’s performance on the track, followed by Beatrice’s commentary arranged in two columns. Under the title Negatives she’d written sluggish, bloated, swollen ankles/wrists. Positives included one-tenth of a second cut from her sprint time. That was May 8th.
On May 9th she’d recorded her mile time—four minutes thirty-two seconds. In italics was the word slow. And she’d noted, Coach asked about my time. What could I say? Tired, I guess. Maybe more sprints would help. Tomorrow.
The doctor was right. Beatrice had expected better from her body. It seemed to Nicole that the girl had set goals that were nearly impossible to attain. She’d run a mile at four and a half minutes. Nicole had never broken five. And yet the vic hadn’t been happy.
She turned to the next page. Same setup. Beatrice was organized. Every page began with the date, the type of run, followed by the time it had taken to complete it and reflections on her performance. A pattern began to emerge. Two days a week the vic completed sprints and fartleks at the high school track. Sometimes she wrote down comments her coach had made to her—most of them balanced on the tail of reasonable. Two days a week Beatrice ran a fast mile on the track and indicated her time. On Wednesdays she ran a 5K to build her endurance. This was also the vic’s cross-country event.
At first, Nicole noticed small achievements. In late May Beatrice had run a four-twenty-eight mile and noted next to it that there was only one other girl her age in county competition who could best that time. On July 4th, Beatrice trimmed her mile to four minutes twenty-two-point-zero-three seconds. But on July 20th there was a sudden drop in her performance and her mile clocked at four minutes fifty-five seconds. An exclamation mark was noted beside the time, the ink dark and smeared, the paper carved by the many repetitions of the pen point over it. Beatrice had been upset. Clearly. And below the time she had scrolled Nueva Vida. That same week, Nicole found, Beatrice’s longer run—three-point-one miles on the cross-country field—took significantly longer to complete. Her coach was concerned. So were her teammates. The vic had written in the margins, Coach wants to speak with me and my parents. He wants to know what’s going on. If something’s wrong. What happened to my edge? Lauren is catching up to my time.
Nicole paged through the next week and then the next, noting the continued and not-so-subtle decline in Beatrice’s performance. The last week of August showed a turnaround. Not just a stability of numbers, but a climb in the right direction. Nicole continued to turn pages and found that by September 9th, Beatrice was back to the numbers she’d put up in early July, and then she exceeded them. Her mile time improved to four minutes seventeen seconds. Nicole turned two pages forward, to the vic’s next mile run, to find that Beatrice had shattered her own personal best by clocking a four minute eleven-point-seven mile. At that level, shaving six seconds off a PB in just days was not possible, was it? And yet, Beatrice had indicated it was. Three more pages in and Nicole realized the mile times cantered at a crazy four minutes and one one-hundredth of a second. They teetered there for twelve days and then there was another sudden decline: four minutes thirty-one seconds. Dad told coach running isn’t everything. His daughter should be well-rounded. And he asked me to drop from the team. There will be time for sports later, Beatrice. Next year. But I won’t. I’m not a quitter.
A father with great expectations—why would he ask Beatrice to sacrifice certain glory on the track and the real possibility of a full scholarship to a top college? What was there to be gained from that? No good reason surfaced, so Nicole left that thought alone for a while and went back to the diary. She counted backward. Each slide in performance hit after three weeks of excellence.
What had happened every three weeks to cause the dip in performance? What had caused her to wallow in that trough for—Nicole paged backward to get an accurate read—four to five weeks, followed by a remarkable improvement in time?
She pulled out her cell and sent off a text to MacAulay. Steroids? She didn’t expect a quick reply. MacAulay sometimes forgot he had a cell phone, and he complained his fingers were too large to use the keyboard. Nicole had given him a stylus—actually three or four, so he’d always have one handy—and this had resulted in same-day returns. Rarely within minutes, but this time MacAulay surprised her.
No trace in prelim.