CHICAGO
May 1982
THE CHILD REMAINED SLEEPING AS GRETA CONTINUED HER STORY about Angela Mitchell and how the two had come to know each other. Frank and Marla Moore listened from the couch as Greta poured coffee.
“I slipped Angela my phone number that day we first met in the corner of the rec room at Bayer Group. She was alone in the world with no one, not even her parents, to turn to. I had to help her. I spoke with both her doctor and the director of Bayer Group. My boss at the hospital back then was close with the medical director over there, and with some pushing, I was able to get Angela’s parents more involved and have the lithium stopped. It took a few weeks, and during the whole process, I met regularly with Angela. Not in any formal manner, just as . . . I guess you’d call us friends.”
Greta sat on the couch and sipped her coffee. She looked at Frank. “And that’s how you found me. Because of my friendship with Angela. When she turned eighteen, Bayer Group could no longer keep her unless she chose to stay. She did not. She called me to pick her up. I pressed her to contact her parents, but that relationship was too fractured to repair. So I obliged. She signed herself out of Bayer Group, but my name was on the log that day as the one who picked her up. The best I can tell, it was our only mistake. I brought Angela here to the farmhouse. She stayed for a year, working and saving money until she had enough to move on. When she was nineteen, she left for the city. That was 1968. She found a job and was managing on her own. She called every so often. Even called to tell me she had met a man,” Greta said. “Unfortunately, that man was Thomas Mitchell.”
She took another sip of coffee.
Marla and Frank were sitting on the edge of the couch. Marla was listening intently, and Frank sensed that she was working to make the final connection.
“So you and Angela stayed in touch?” Frank asked to move the conversation along.
“Not really,” Greta said. “For a while we did. For a few years, she’d call every once in a while to tell me how she was doing. She told me her parents had moved to St. Louis, that she had found a job, that she had her own apartment. I was very encouraging, and I always invited her out to the farmhouse if she wanted a visit. But then she met Thomas, and after that she stopped calling. Years went by and I didn’t hear a thing from her.”
Greta paused again to sip her coffee. She replaced the cup on the saucer and looked back at Frank and Marla.
“Then, in the summer of 1979, I saw the news reports.”
“That Angela had disappeared?” Marla asked.
“Yes. My heart broke when I saw her face on the television. And when the news came out that her husband was the man responsible for all those missing women from that summer, I felt that I had failed Angela. I had worked so hard to help her when I first found her sitting at the table all alone at Bayer Group. We had become close during the year she spent here. But then, I just let her leave. I let her walk off into the world. When I heard what happened to her, I was stricken with guilt that I hadn’t done more to guide her life. For those two days my heart ached in a way I’d never experienced.”
“For what two days?” Marla asked.
Greta looked at Frank. He nodded. Frank Moore needed his wife to hear it all.
* * *
Greta Schreiber sat at the workbench in the room upstairs. The wall shelves were decorated with porcelain china dolls arranged in perfect rows. She had started a new project two days before, just after news spread about the most recent events in Chicago. Angela, the girl she had befriended at Bayer Group years earlier, and who had spent an entire year at the farmhouse when she was eighteen years old, had gone missing and was suspected to be the latest victim of the man authorities called The Thief. The startling revelation that this man was Angela’s husband had sent Greta pacing the kitchen for the better part of the night. But now, the damaged doll in front of her was providing the distraction she needed. The hairline fracture, which ran across the crown of the skull, down over the ear, and to the base of the jaw, required just enough attention that for as long as she worked on it, she didn’t think of the young girl she once knew.
A noise pulled her concentration away from the restoration. She heard an automobile’s wheels crunching over the gravel of the long driveway that led from the main road to the farmhouse. Greta stood from the workbench and walked over to the window, peeling the curtains to the side. She saw a silver sedan pulling slowly down the drive, a gray cloud of dust floating behind it. Tubs and Harold barked and jumped alongside the approaching vehicle.
She stayed at the window while she watched the car approach, and only when it stopped with no sign of the driver leaving the vehicle did Greta turn from the window and head down the stairs. A moment later, she opened the front door and walked onto the porch. The car was parked at the front of her lot, the driver sitting behind the wheel. The windshield reflected the blue sky and maple trees to prevent a clear look at the person behind the wheel. Greta waited until finally the driver’s-side door opened. A thin woman climbed from the car, a hooded sweatshirt drooping from her frail frame. She lifted both hands to her head and pulled the hood down.
“Sweet Jesus,” Greta said, bounding from the porch and down the steps. When she reached the woman, she hugged her tightly.
The woman whispered into Greta’s ear.
“I need your help.”
Greta backed away, taking Angela’s face in her hands. She had the appearance of an alopecia patient. Her eyebrows were missing, and the lashes on her lids were present only in random clusters. Scratch marks climbed her neck and stretched beyond the collar of her sweatshirt. Greta remembered a similar appearance from when she had first met Angela at Bayer Group, but today’s version was severely pronounced.
“We need to call the police. People think you’re dead.”
“No. We can’t call the police. We can’t call anyone. He can never find us. Promise me, Greta. Promise you’ll never let him find us.”