CHAPTER 28
Chicago, November 1, 2019
RORY PUSHED THE APPEALS LETTERS TO THE SIDE AND PULLED IN front of her the stack with Angela Mitchell’s name scrawled across the top. The pages chronicled her father’s search for the woman after she disappeared in 1979. Rory had been reading these pages the morning Celia found her in her father’s office. She had been scanning the names of the people her father contacted during his search when Celia showed up with the safe-deposit box’s key.
Rory forced the rest of it from her mind—the idea that her father was subtly trying to keep Thomas Mitchell in jail—and concentrated only on that which was in front of her. There was something ominous about seeing proof that her father had been searching for Angela Mitchell. Catherine Blackwell’s notes left little doubt that it was true, but some part of Rory refused to believe it. Now, as she sat staring at her late father’s notes that recorded his search for Angela, she could no longer deny it. The woman was out there somewhere.
Rory read about her father’s trip to St. Louis to talk with Angela’s parents. She read about his visit to Catherine Blackwell’s house on the north side of Chicago. She read about his trip to a psychiatric hospital where Angela had been treated when she was a teenager. Rory pored through her father’s investigation into the whereabouts of Angela Mitchell with a rabid thirst for details, turning the pages with fervor and frenzy until she came to the name of a nurse—the nurse who had driven Angela Mitchell away from the hospital on her eighteenth birthday. Rory’s vision funneled until a strange kaleidoscope of images danced in front of her when she saw the woman’s name: Margaret Schreiber.
She had trouble breathing, her lungs heavy with panic and confusion, unable to expand or contract. Her father had been searching for Angela Mitchell, retracing her life and following her past to a juvenile psychiatric hospital—where she had been befriended by the woman Rory had believed her whole life to be her great-aunt, but whose identity had been blurred by the adoption papers and birth certificates. None of it registered in Rory’s mind. Her confusion could be chalked up to denial, but she knew it was more than that. She had been trained to see things others did not. To root through details of cases and reconstruct a picture of events that was invisible to others. But discovering a connection between Greta and Angela sent her mind spiraling. A deep ache started below her sternum and rose like bubbling lava from the crater of a long-dormant volcano. Rory couldn’t remember the last panic attack she’d had. It would have been as a child. It would have been before she found the healing outlet in the upstairs room of Greta’s farmhouse.
She swallowed the rest of her Dark Lord, hoping the fluid would physically wash away the rising fear, and that the alcohol would dull her senses. She ran to the refrigerator and popped the top on another beer, stood in the darkened kitchen and raised the bottle to her mouth. In a few swallows it was half gone. Dizzy, she stumbled to her den and clicked on the lights. She stared at the china dolls that lined the shelves. The room was a replica of the farmhouse and she hoped the sight of the restored dolls would dampen the panic that coursed through her body.
Rory needed to occupy her mind with something other than thoughts of Greta and her parents and how they might be linked to Angela Mitchell. Having just completed the restoration of Camille Byrd’s doll, she had no current projects to work on. She opened the chest that sat in the corner and pulled out a doll she had purchased at auction. It was tattered and ruined and would take a great deal of skill and concentration to restore. Rory sat at her workbench and tried to analyze the damage, but her mind would not take the bait. The usual lure of the doll’s needs was trumped tonight by the discovery that Greta had known Angela. Her go-to method of skirting a panic attack was failing.
She left the den, grabbed another Dark Lord, and ran out to her car. She pulled from the curb with her headlights bringing to life the dark and empty Chicago streets. She drove without thinking. She knew the address from the file. It was on the north side. She took side streets and tried to control her speed. She was in no condition to be behind the wheel, both from too many Dark Lords and because she was not in her right mind. Twenty minutes later, she pulled past the bungalow where Angela Mitchell had lived in 1979. The houses were close together, and the entire block was silent and dark, with only front-porch lights shining in the darkness.
Rory stared at the front of the house for a few minutes, sensing the strong connection she had felt since first learning about Angela Mitchell. A relationship had formed, like with the subjects of the crimes she reconstructed, between her and Angela. Rory felt an obligation to find the woman. To let her know that there was someone who understood her struggles and her pain.
Pulling past the house, she turned the corner and crept into the alley behind the home. A chain-link fence protected the small backyard of Angela Mitchell’s previous residence. A detached garage opened into the alley. Rory stood from her car and walked in front of it. She stared at the back of the home. She wondered what had transpired here all those years ago, and how it was connected to all the people in her life.
The car’s headlights cast her shadow along the pavement of the alley, her legs forming an inverted V. As Rory stared at her shadow, she sensed something inside her, something tugging for her attention. She could not place the feeling or determine why the sight of her shadow gave her such a chill until she realized that the headlights threw a silhouette on the ground in the exact same way Thomas Mitchell designed his A’s in his perfect block penmanship with no crosshatch—Λ. Then it occurred to her. As she stood in the dark alley and stared at her shadow, she realized that she had not only come to Angela’s home, but to Thomas Mitchell’s as well. The revelation hollowed her chest and gave resurgence to her hyperventilating lungs. But it was impossible for Rory to understand the real reason for her clairvoyance. She was standing in the exact same spot where Angela Mitchell stood forty years earlier, just as determined to uncover what had happened to the women who went missing that summer as Rory was today.
The back-porch light came on and caught her attention. Then the kitchen window flashed with light from inside. The rear door opened.
“Can I help you with something?” a man yelled from the door frame. “Or maybe I should call the cops and see if they can help? Or maybe I’ll come out there and utilize my Second Amendment rights for someone trespassing on my property.”
Jolted by the sudden confrontation, Rory turned and hurried back into her car. Her shadow darting and then disappearing.
“Get the hell out of here!” she heard the man yell as she climbed behind the wheel. She pulled out of the alley, sideswiping a trashcan in the process.