Free Tonight I Said Goodbye (St. Martin's Minotaur Mystery) by Michael Koryta

reached out and began to sort through the stuffed animals. There were dozens of them on the floor, ranging from bears to rabbits, with a special emphasis on kittens.
    I turned a few of them over, squeezed them, felt their softness, and looked into their unblinking plastic eyes as if they could tell me something. Several of the animals were wearing outfits; some made noises when you squeezed them; others had movable limbs. One scholarly bear was wearing glasses and had a plastic piece of chalk in one paw and a plastic chalkboard tucked under his arm. I pulled the bear closer and saw that the chalkboard was the cover for a small booklet that closed with a snap. I slid the booklet out from where it was tucked under the bear's paw, opened it, and discovered the little book was a diary. The first entry, in a woman's writing, read: "Merry Christmas, Betsy! Love, Mom and Dad."
    I flipped through the rest of it. The pages were filled with a child's drawings and writing. There were quite a few stick figures, lots of hearts, and the name Betsy, all done with various colors of crayon. Every now and then she wrote a few crudely constructed sentences. "Mom made me soop and greeled cheese," read one entry. There were maybe five or six entries for each month. On every page she'd used, the girl had carefully written the date. Her spelling of "April" was perfect, but "February" had given her fits. I continued turning pages until I reached the last entry. It had been made on March fourth, the day before Weston's body was found and the search for Betsy Weston and her mother became the city's hottest news story.
    Joe poked his head in the door. "The bedroom was a waste. You got anything worth looking at?"
    I didn't turn around. "They're alive, Joe."
    "Excuse me?"
    "Betsy Weston wrote this in her diary the night she disappeared," I said.
    Joe crossed the room and knelt beside me, then read the diary entry, written in a child's scrawl with a green crayon:
Tonite I said goodby
.

CHAPTER 7

    "T ONIGHT I said goodbye." Joe read it aloud and then raised his eyes and looked at me. "What the hell does that mean?"
    "It means she knew she was leaving," I said.
    "That's a beautiful thought," he said. "But you don't have much evidence to base it on."
    "She wrote something, or drew something, every day this year, Joe. On the night she and her mother disappear, she writes this, and you don't think it means anything?"
    He looked at the entry again, then sighed, his eyes thoughtful. "I'm not saying it doesn't mean anything. I'm just wondering how she possibly could have known to write it. Said goodbye to what? Her house or her dad?"
    "Or both," I said.
    "Keep the book," Joe said. "But don't let the old man see it. The last thing we want is for him to be any more convinced they're alive."
    We left the house and checked the garage. A Toyota sport utility vehicle and a Lexus remained, as well as a collection of tools and more toys. Julie Weston and her daughter hadn't left in one of the family cars. But that didn't mean they couldn't have left alive.
    We returned to John Weston and gave him the key.
    "Find anything helpful?" he asked.
    Joe and I exchanged a glance, then Joe said, "Just seeing the home is helpful, Mr. Weston."
    He looked at Joe blankly and didn't respond. We left, promising tobe in touch. When I pulled out of the driveway he was still sitting on the table. I wondered if he'd be there all day.
    "Well," Joe said as I drove, "that wasn't much help. You think they're alive now, because of one sentence written in a little girl's diary. And, while I respect that hunch, it still isn't any help in finding them."
    "No," I admitted, "it isn't." I pulled onto Brecksville Road and headed north, back toward the city, following roughly the same path the Cuyahoga River takes as it winds its way toward the heart of downtown and into the Flats. The sun was out, and the digital thermometer on the rearview mirror said it was forty-seven degrees outside--not warm