Ellery braced herself for a fight with McKenna’s father the judge about whether they would be allowed to question her outside the presence of her parents, but Dorie’s soft touch won him over. Head tilted downward in deference, big pleading eyes. Dorie gave him the works. “If it was the other way around and McKenna was the one who was missing, wouldn’t you want Chloe to share absolutely everything she knows?”
“Of course you can talk to her,” Judge McIntyre said as he let them inside another posh suburban home. “I just don’t think she can be of any additional help. McKenna answered your questions yesterday and she’s been in bed with a stomachache today. This whole business is quite upsetting for her.”
“I feel for the girl. I do,” Dorie said. “But you must have seen the news conference this afternoon with Chloe’s parents today.”
He gave a short nod of assent. “I saw.”
“Then you don’t have to imagine how upsetting it is for the Lockharts.”
He hesitated another beat before relenting. “McKenna is upstairs in her bedroom. I’ll show you the way.”
Soon Ellery found herself in another teen girl’s bedroom, this one smaller than Chloe’s but screaming money all the same. McKenna’s room featured gleaming white crown moldings set off against chiffon-pink walls. Her bed was as big as Ellery’s at home, and above it hung a crystal chandelier. McKenna took out her earbuds and put down her phone as her father and the detectives entered her room. “Sweetheart, these officers have a few more questions for you about Chloe,” he explained.
McKenna curled into her overstuffed pillows, hugging a heart-shaped one against her chest. “I said everything I knew already. If I knew where she was right now, I’d tell you. I swear.”
“We believe you,” Dorie assured her. “We just have a few minor details we think you can help us with.”
“Like what?” McKenna asked, still wary.
“Some more information about who Chloe’s friends are. Stuff like that.”
She shrugged one shoulder. “I guess.”
“I’ll be downstairs if you need me,” her father said. He paused at the door and ran his hand down the edge. “We’re all praying for Chloe to come home safely.”
He left and McKenna regarded the detectives. “It’s true,” she said. “We had a special prayer in church for her this morning.”
“Does Chloe go to your church?”
“Only sometimes. Her mom works on Sundays.”
“What do you think of Mrs. Lockhart?” Dorie asked as Ellery wandered about the room. McKenna apparently collected glass figurines of sea creatures. There was a shelf of them next to her desk.
“She’s okay, I guess.” McKenna picked at the edge of her bedspread. “When we were little kids, our families had a picnic at the park and this guy on a motorcycle had an accident right near us. He lost control or something and flipped through the air and landed on his head. Mrs. Lockhart ran over there to give him CPR and other first aid before the ambulance came. My dad told me later she saved that guy’s life, which I guess is pretty cool when you think about it. But mostly, she’s not around when I’m at their house. Mimi is.”
Ellery looked over the truly amazing amount of makeup and jewelry covering the top of McKenna’s vanity. She picked up a metallic blue eyeliner, a brand she didn’t recognize, and put it back down. Her own mother would’ve thrown a fit if she’d tried to wear this stuff at age thirteen. McKenna had tacked some photos along the edges of her large mirror, and Ellery scanned each one in turn, looking for Chloe. Where McKenna had featured prominently in Chloe’s photo stream, Ellery saw only one picture of Chloe in McKenna’s grouping. It showed the girls in pigtails and one-piece swimsuits, obviously taken years ago.
“Did Chloe get along with her mother?” Dorie asked as Ellery continued snooping.
“Not really.” McKenna kept her eyes on Ellery. “No offense or anything, but moms can sometimes be a total drag. Mine won’t let me wear heels higher than one inch. She’s got a ruler to check them and everything. Chloe’s parents were even way more strict. They barely let her out of the house.”
Ellery pointed at the pictures. “Is that why you’ve been hanging out with her less?”
McKenna’s face turned red. “Yeah, I guess. Like, my sister and her friends drove out to Six Flags earlier this summer, and they said they’d bring me and a friend of mine, too. Chloe couldn’t come because of her parents, so I took Brooke instead.”
“Was Chloe ever tempted to sneak out?” asked Dorie.
“She tried once last year when Kevin Rohr was having a pool party. But somehow she set off the alarm in her house. Her parents took away all her electronics for a month after that.” McKenna gave a small shudder of horror at the thought. “Her phone and computer are, like, her lifeline. They may as well’ve put her in a dungeon.”
“Except Chloe had a second phone,” Ellery pointed out.
“Yeah.” There was a touch of admiration in McKenna’s voice. She held her own phone like a talisman between her hands.
“Still no idea who could’ve given it to her?”
A shadow crossed the girl’s face. Ellery could see Dorie saw it, too. “If you know something,” Dorie told her, “now is the time to tell us.”
McKenna blew her bangs out of her eyes. “You’ve got to understand, Chloe was the youngest kid in our class. She wasn’t even thirteen yet and a bunch of us are turning fourteen soon. A couple of the guys are shaving.” At their look of disbelief, she pulled out a picture on her phone to show them. “It’s true! Barnaby’s parents redshirted him. He’s going to be fifteen in December.”
Ellery and Dorie leaned in to squint at a blond kid with no discernible facial hair. “Redshirt?” Ellery asked.
“Held him back when he should’ve started kindergarten. It’s supposed to give you an edge because you’re like a year older or something. Chloe’s parents could’ve had a legit reason for keeping her back because her birthday was so close to the cutoff, but, like, that would’ve been totally insane. She’s wicked smart. Mr. Donovan stopped calling on her in math class because everyone else would just wait for her to get the answer first.”
Ellery had been the smart kid in her early years. By middle school, she’d stopped caring where X went or how to diagram a complex sentence. Her father had left. Daniel got sick. She’d liked school because her friends had shared their extra food with her—cookies and chips and half a sandwich crammed full with meat. All stuff they never had at home. “So, Chloe’s the youngest and she knows lots of answers. How’d that shake out on the playground?”
McKenna made a face that said her classmates wouldn’t be caught dead near a playground. “Chloe tried hard. Too hard. You could see her trying to impress people, but they mostly ignored her or made fun of her behind her back. It’s not like she could invite friends over. The Lockharts would only allow that if they knew the other parents and had met them first. So, sometimes Chloe made up stories. One time she said Tom Brady—you know, the quarterback?”
Dorie suppressed a grin. “We’ve heard of him,” she said dryly.
“Chloe said her parents had a dinner party and Tom and Gisele came. She said Mrs. Lockhart knew him from the hospital, where he stopped by to visit sick kids. A few kids believed her because she had a signed picture from him, but if Tom Brady comes to your house, you’re gonna take a selfie with him, right?”
Ellery thought of the picture of Chloe and the unidentified boy. “Right.”
“It turns out the part about the hospital was true. Mrs. Lockhart got Tom to sign a picture over to Chloe, but Chloe didn’t meet him. He definitely didn’t come to her house for dinner.”
“Okay, so she exaggerates sometimes,” Dorie said.
McKenna took a deep breath. “Right. So, when she said she suddenly had this mystery friend who gave her the phone, I kinda figured that maybe she bought it for herself.”
Now that would be an interesting development, thought Ellery. It would fit with the notion that Chloe orchestrated the disappearance to get back at her parents for their restrictive upbringing. But would a twelve-year-old girl send that vicious text to her mother? Also, Chloe obviously had some sort of destination in mind when she left the park. She had to be somewhere. Ellery pulled out her phone to show McKenna the picture of Chloe and the unknown boy. McKenna’s hand flew to her mouth when she saw it.
“Wait, he’s real?”
“Who’s real? You know this guy?” She tried not to leap on the girl too hard, but she felt the familiar tingle of a developing lead. Finally, they were going to get a name.
“She called him Ty. She said she knew this cool older skater guy and he liked her back, but he didn’t go to our school. I figured he was just another one of her stories. Like, where’s Chloe going to meet a guy like that? Mimi doesn’t let her out of her sight.”
“Online, maybe,” Dorie offered, and Ellery agreed.
“We really need to get that dump of her computer and cell phone.”
McKenna looked horrified. “Wait, you’re going to like … read all her messages?”
“Don’t worry,” Ellery told her. “We won’t share them around. But if there’s anything in there you think we need to know, it’s better if you tell us now.”
Her shoulders went up around her ears. “No, nothing illegal or anything like that. Just stupid jokes and stuff about boys that I wouldn’t want my dad to read, you know?” She got up from the bed and went to her window—the one with the heavy custom drapes that shimmered as she pushed one aside. “I don’t like to think about her out there by herself. I can’t even believe this is happening. When my dad first told me Chloe was gone, I kept hoping it wasn’t real, that it was just a game she made up to trick her parents. Like hide-and-go-seek or something.” She turned to look at them and Ellery saw a little girl’s frightened gaze pleading under all that eyeliner. “But it’s not, is it? It’s real.”
They didn’t have to answer her because she already knew the truth. Ellery took in the large flat-screen television mounted to the wall, the two-hundred-dollar headphones lying on McKenna’s bed, and the enormous rack of shoes visible through the open closet door. She’d never liked the admonition that “money can’t buy happiness,” because in her experience, the people who said it had never had to go hungry or sleep alone in a car at night. If money wasn’t going to make you happy, it could at least make you comfortable while you dealt with all your other shit. But she felt some sympathy for McKenna, and for her father and all the other parents feeling vulnerable or bewildered. They were learning what Teresa Lockhart surely knew: Tragedy swept in like fog, seeping through the cracks of even the richest homes. Once it happened, it didn’t matter how big or fancy your place was on the outside. Inside, it felt the same.