“A few weeks later, James finished his residency. He joined an internal medicine practice in Greenwich, Connecticut, and we resettled there. My first novel vanished without a trace, but the second became a surprise best seller. Knopf offered a three-book contract with a bigger advance than I’d ever dared to imagine. We put a down payment on the Lake Avenue house.
“Our family continued to grow. After Sam and our daughter Lillian, we had the twins, Lucy and Patsy, and then Robert came along, our little caboose. Those were busy, crazy times, but also full and fun. I wouldn’t have traded a day of it.
“Once the whole brood was grown and launched, James and I bought the apartment on Riverside Drive. I loved the idea of a pied-à-terre in Manhattan, and we wanted a river view, but any time the broker suggested I look at a listing on the East Side, I refused. I wanted to stay away from Sutton Place.
“And I did—until last fall. I’d agreed to speak at a fund-raiser for Literacy Partners. My publicist had arranged everything. Until I was in the car on the way, I had no idea the event was to be held in a penthouse down the block from where Bitsy used to live.
“We’d left extra time because of the snow, so we arrived a few minutes early. I asked the driver to take a slow loop around the neighborhood. And I was glad I did. Avoidance did not erase reality. Bitsy’s disappearance was a tragic fact. I’d do better to confront it than try to pretend it hadn’t happened. Soon after that, I became preoccupied with the case and realized I needed to write about it.
“I didn’t return to Sutton Place until I was deeply into the story. By then, I’d traveled to London to meet with Harold’s business partner, Richard DeWitt, and to France to see his brother Gregory. Several of Harold’s friends had retired to Florida, so I spent a couple of weeks in Palm Beach and Key Biscayne.
“Harold’s children live in the flats of Beverly Hills. Both of them are over sixty now. Trey is twice divorced, with two adult daughters, engaged to a very young, very beautiful actress. Marissa and her partner, an artist named Eloise, own an art gallery on Rodeo Drive.
“None of them had seen Harold in many years. After Bitsy’s disappearance, he’d settled in Costa Rica. He’d lived a simple life in relative seclusion. A decade ago, he suffered a massive stroke and died instantly. He left everything to a charitable trust dedicated to preserving Caribbean rainforests. Trey and Marissa hired big gun lawyers to challenge the will, but they lost.
“My last stop was Bitsy’s hometown. Myrtle, Mississippi, is tiny. Population five hundred. Everyone knows everybody and everything, and everyone was eager to talk. Bitsy’s father had died years earlier, but I met members of the Baptist congregation where he used to preach. Reverend Yudis had always liked his whiskey, which he took—naturally—for medicinal purposes. He’d started hitting the bottle harder after Bitsy ran away. One night after many too many at Gus’s Tavern, he rammed his pickup head-on into a Kia carrying a family with two little boys. No one survived.
“I spoke with a man named Brent Gregorio. He ran the soybean farm that had been in his family for six generations. He’d gone to high school with Bitsy’s mother, Jenny Lou. Crying shame what had become of her, he said: mean drunk of a husband, miserable life. Years after Bitsy ran off, Jenny went missing. Her body turned up weeks later, floating in the creek. The coroner ruled the drowning accidental, but Mr. Gregorio was convinced she’d committed suicide.
“A retired teacher named Bobbi-Jo Cline had been Bitsy’s English teacher at West Union High. She remembered Bitsy as pretty and well-liked, but strangely serious at times. Two of Bitsy’s best childhood friends, Nora Bea Strang and Clara Addison, described her the same way. They’d be having fun, doing each other’s hair, talking nonsense, and then for no reason she’d go glum. Both of them now have gray hair and grandkids. Only Bitsy stayed frozen in time.”
Jeffers was jotting faster now, stopping at intervals to reach down and tap something on the iPhone he had hidden poorly in his lap.
“At that point, I’d exhausted all my leads in Myrtle. On the morning I was scheduled to fly out, a woman named CeeCee Adlen called my cellphone. She’d heard I was in town, asking around about Bitsy. She’d moved to Jacksonville years earlier, but she’d made the three-hour drive to see me. I agreed to meet her at the diner and changed to a later flight.
“CeeCee had plenty to say, all bad. Her son Ray had fallen for Bitsy back in high school, and they’d been sweethearts. CeeCee had always known the girl was a two-bit phony. She’d tried to talk some sense into Ray, but he’d been blinded by the pretty package. He’d been such a good boy. But after that ‘little slut’—her words—took off on him, he fell apart. Got into drugs. Started stealing to support his habit. He’d been in and out of prison since. One week after he was last paroled in ’04, he was shot to death in a bar fight. Left a wife and four kids. Bitsy was to blame. No matter that she’d been out of Ray’s life since high school. People see what they want to see.”