A Body to Spare (The Odelia Grey Mysteries) by Sue Ann Jaffarian Page A

several pages later in the report. She was two years older than Zach and had graduated from high school earlier that year. At the time of Zach’s disappearance, she’d been attending a local community college and lived at home. Her name was Jean Finch. I did a search of the report for her name and located the report of her questioning. The night of Zach’s disappearance, Jean had gone out with her boyfriend, Ryan Wright, and another young couple to the movies. She’d returned home before midnight and claimed she’d gone straight to bed after saying hello to her mother, who’d been waiting up for her children. Jean reported that her mother had asked if she’d seen Zach while out because he was late, and Jean responded that she had not.
    I searched again, this time looking for the mother’s testimony. Her name was Maryanne Finch. She’d told the police that after Jean came home, she had remained in her chair, watching late-night TV and waiting for her son. She didn’t remember when she fell asleep, but she woke up around sunrise. Thinking Zach had come in but had not wanted to disturb her, she went to his room to check on him but found it empty and his bed not slept in. That was when she woke her husband. According to Mrs. Finch, she was the parent who had stayed up late waiting for their children, stating that her husband kept long hours at the office and was often too tired in the evenings to stay up much past ten.
    Attached to Clark’s report was a photo of the Finch family taken from a newspaper. Maryanne Finch looked like the typical Midwest wife of a wealthy man. Her hair was honey blond and coiffed in a beautifully cut style that I remembered as being in vogue during that time period. In the photo she was wearing tennis togs and looked fit and confident. The rest of the family was also dressed in tennis clothing. The caption read that the Finch family had captured first place in their country club’s annual family tennis tournament. It had been their second win in a row, and from the ages of the kids, I guessed this photo had been taken shortly before Zach evaporated. It was possibly the summer between then and his sister’s high-school graduation. Next to his wife, Alec Finch was tall and tan and held his racket like a weapon at the ready. Mr. and Mrs. Finch were flanked by their offspring. Maryanne had her arms around the waists of both her husband and son. On the other side of Alec was Jean, who looked a lot like her mother but with her father’s strong jaw. Both kids held their rackets in both hands like their father. All four flashed smiles of perfect white teeth and looked ready to beat off anyone who threatened their tight-knit family.
    But someone had threatened the family and torn it apart by grabbing Zach, and tennis rackets and tournament-winning backhands had not been able to stop it.
    Toggling from the screen with the report, I brought up a clean page and started typing out the names of the players: Alec Finch, Maryanne Finch, Jean Finch, and Zach Finch, for starters. I put the names in a table I created first and in a column headed Family . Then in a column with the heading of Friends , I added the names of Zach’s friends who’d been with him that night: Chris Cook, Ben Myers, and Nathan Glick. I also added Ryan Wright, Jean’s boyfriend, since he was mentioned in the report. I wanted to look them all up and see if I could find out where they were today.
    According to Clark, Maryanne Finch had died by her own hand a few years after Zach’s disappearance, so I didn’t need to check on her. Still, I dug a little deeper into Clark’s information until I came across the notation about Zach’s mother. Despondent after her son’s kidnapping, Maryanne Finch fell into a downward spiral of depression, booze, and drugs until she finally took her own life two years later. She’d been dramatic about it. Using her husband’s handgun that he kept in the house for protection, Maryanne had shot