Ellery flew down I-95, the wheels of her SUV barely meeting the road as she wove her way around the slower traffic. Dorie rode shotgun while Reed sat in the back, swaying with the body of the car and periodically clutching the door. “Let’s get there alive, okay?” Dorie said, looking up from her phone.
“Yes, please,” Reed called from the backseat.
“What’s the latest on this woman?” Ellery asked. “Jenna Desmond?”
“She’s clean,” Dorie replied as she checked her phone. “No record.”
“Nothing on our end, either,” Reed added.
“She’s thirty-two years old, married to a guy named Nicholas Desmond, and works as a speech therapist for the Providence schools. Address is listed as Gray Street in Providence per her driver’s license.”
Ellery shook her head. “None of that makes any sense. What’s her connection to Chloe? Could she have worked in the Brookline schools, too?”
“We’re checking, but no sign of that so far.”
“What about the Lockharts? Did anyone ask them about her?”
“Conroy ran the name Jenna Desmond past them and they deny knowing her.”
Ellery looked to Reed in the rearview mirror. “Help me out here, Reed,” she said. “What’s her deal?”
“Your guess is as good as mine right now. Perhaps she is not your kidnapper. She may be covering for someone else.” He hesitated. “Or perhaps it isn’t Chloe on the video—though I’ll admit, the likeness is impressive.”
Ellery tightened her hands on the wheel. It wasn’t just the likeness. Yes, the girl in the Target store had Chloe’s aquamarine eyes, blond hair, and fine bone structure. But Ellery had spent hours by now looking at the video of Chloe Lockhart leaving the Public Garden on the day she went missing. The girl in the store moved like her, too. They had the same walk, the same body posture. “No,” she said, more to herself than the others. “We’re right about this.”
Dorie’s phone buzzed again and she took the call on speakerphone. It was Captain Conroy. “I’m with Teresa,” he said. “There’s been another text, which I will forward to you in a moment. The picture shows Chloe in a large cage—the kind you might use for a big dog. She’s got on the same clothes from the day she went missing and there’s duct tape across her mouth. Lighting is poor, so it’s hard to tell if she is otherwise injured. No visible blood from the angle of the shot. The text says: ‘If she dies, will you just get another one?’”
“We’re ten minutes away from Providence now,” Dorie told him.
“Good. There’s one other thing. It looks like she’s being held in a basement. The background of the photo shows a stone foundation—big rocks held in place with mortar. The FBI says that means the house is old, maybe 1880s. Possibly still intact or there may be a more modern house built on top of the old foundation.”
For Ellery, the closet had been an upright coffin. Smothering in the summer heat, she’d been literally dying of thirst and bleeding out on the wooden floorboards around her. She could still feel the gouges from the desperate girls who had been there before her. The ones who never got free. She pressed the gas pedal all the way to the floor.
The large marble dome of the Providence State House came into view on the left side of the road, signaling their arrival at the city limits. It was too far away to see clearly the eleven-foot figure Ellery knew stood atop the dome, a golden statue of a semi-naked man crowned in a wreath of greenery and holding a spear. Her eyes sought him out anyway because of his name, The Independent Man, and the principle he stood for: freedom. As they headed for Jenna Desmond’s address, Ellery had to slow the car or risk rolling the SUV around a sharp corner.
She knew she’d hit the right neighborhood when she saw a lineup of Providence PD black-and-white units parked all in a row. She slowed further, driving past them and around the corner onto Gray Street. “That’s the place right there,” Dorie said, leaning forward to peer out the front window. Ellery pulled off to the side and parked the car.
“We’ve got company,” she said, nodding up the road to a parked sedan with a pair of men sitting in it. She flashed her headlights at them, and one of the men, a moustached but otherwise hairless guy, got out of the car. He wore mirrored sunglasses and walked like he’d been sitting for a while. She rolled down her window as he approached.
“Detective Jake Osborne,” he said to her. “We’ve been watching the place for two and a half hours now, ever since that Target video set off all kinds of alarms.”
“And?” Ellery asked him. She looked toward the house. It was a pinkish-beige color, two stories, with a neat row of bushes at the front. Colorful perennials added cheer and the metal railing on the porch appeared to be freshly painted. She spotted a kid’s bicycle overturned on the front walk and, beyond it, an old stone foundation.
“Nothing. No one in or out. The Subaru in the driveway is registered to Nicholas and Jenna Desmond, which suggests someone is home. We had someone walk by with a dog about an hour ago to glimpse the backyard. Nothing there but a kiddie pool and some lawn furniture. She confirmed the AC unit is on, which again points to the house being occupied. Mostly, though, we’ve been hanging back, waiting on your move.”
Ellery looked around at the neighboring houses. All were well-kept historic homes. She spotted several other rock foundations. New Englanders had built these houses hundreds of years ago, and generations of frugal Yankees kept right on recycling them. Ellery wished she had X-ray vision to see inside. The thought of Chloe in a cage in the basement made her want to take a battering ram and knock down the door. Osborne seemed to read her thoughts.
“We’ve got backup parked one block over, if you need it. We can take the place whenever you want.”
She clenched the wheel, tempted. Reed’s suggestion that Jenna Desmond might have a partner gave her pause. They had no idea who or what might be on the other side of the door. “Maybe there’s another way.”
“What are you thinking?” Dorie asked.
Ellery squinted at Osborne. “You have a florist shop around here?”
He looked surprised but pointed westward. “Sure. There’s a grocery about three blocks thataway.”
Ten minutes later, Ellery had a vase full of purple flowers bound by a green bow. Osborne, his partner, Dorie, and Reed all suited up in protective gear emblazoned with law enforcement logos. Ellery demurred. “I’m the decoy, remember? I have to look like a civilian.” She adjusted her windbreaker so it did not show her holster while Osborne had the backup teams come around the block on foot. He gave instructions for four men to go around to the rear of the house and wait. The rest of the teams flanked the front stairs, crouching under the windows as Ellery and her flowers mounted the steps.
Her heart beat erratically, the vase growing slick in her hands. Lace curtains blocked her view in the front window. The front door was a solid brown with no way to see inside. She rang the bell and waited. A few moments later, she heard footsteps and the door cracked open partially. A young woman with a blond ponytail—the same woman from the Target video—peeked out at her. “Yes?”
“Jenna Desmond?”
“Yes, I’m Jenna.”
“I have a flower delivery for you.” Ellery forced herself to smile.
“Really, for me? How nice.” She widened the door, relaxing somewhat as she started to reach for the flowers in Ellery’s hands.
Ellery’s gaze fixed behind her. She saw a shadowed hallway and a moving figure with the unmistakable shape of a gun. “Gun!” she hollered, dropping the vase to the concrete porch. It shattered at her feet as she grabbed Jenna and dragged her out and to the side. Behind her, men with their own guns streamed into the house. Someone was screaming and crying. A child, she realized.
“What are you doing?” Jenna cried, her face pressed down on her own porch. “Let me up!”
“Where’s Chloe Lockhart?” Ellery demanded, pushing her harder into the wooden planks.
“I don’t know. Please, you’re hurting me.”
Dorie appeared with a screaming and thrashing boy in her arms. “This one had the gun. It wasn’t real.”
“Mommy! Mommy!”
“I’m right here, baby.” Jenna struggled to get free, but Ellery held her in place with a knee to her back. “Stop it; you’re scaring my children. It’s okay, Mikey. Mommy’s right here.”
Dorie carried the boy away from the house, which caused Jenna to fight harder.
“Where are you taking him? Michael! Let. Me. Up.”
“Tell me where she is,” Ellery replied harshly. “Where’s Chloe?”
“Ellery,” Reed said, but her name barely registered.
“Tell me! What have you done with her?”
“Ellery!”
She forced herself to look. She saw Reed standing on the far side of the porch. A blond girl stood next to him with tears in her striking blue eyes. “Stop it,” she demanded of Ellery. “You’re hurting her.”
“Ellery, it’s not her.” Reed said the truth that was now apparent to everyone. “It’s not Chloe.”
Ellery eased off of Jenna in surprise as she stared at the girl from the top of her messy ponytail down to her grubby flip-flops, where her toes curled in distress. This girl was shorter than Chloe by two inches; she could see it now. She did not have pierced ears. Her tanned arms and legs said that she got to spend more time outside in the sun than Chloe Lockhart ever did. Otherwise, the resemblance between the girls was eerie. “I’m—sorry.” She rose and let Jenna Desmond off the porch. Both of them trembled in the aftermath.
Jenna brushed bits of glass from her arms and legs. Blood trickled down the inside of her left forearm, but she reached for the girl anyway. “Izzy,” she said, hugging her tight. She glared at Ellery. “Where is Michael? What have you done with Michael?”
“He’s right here,” Dorie called from across the lawn. She put the boy down and he raced to join his family in the group hug.
The crushing weight of disappointment hit Ellery like an anvil from the sky. Not her. They weren’t bringing Chloe home. They weren’t even close. The girl was still out there somewhere, caged in a stone basement.
“We’re terribly sorry for the mix-up, ma’am,” Reed said, stepping forward. “We’re looking for a girl named Chloe Lockhart, and we had reason to suspect she was being held here.”
Osborne appeared on the threshold as if to verify. “The place is clear,” he reported. “No sign of Chloe. Just this pretty young thing here who happens to look just like her.” He smiled at Izzy, who hid her face in her mother’s chest. “We apologize sincerely for our mistake.”
Jenna’s face twisted in a mask of pain and she stroked her daughter’s hair. “You’ve got it all wrong,” she said in a watery voice. “I would never hurt Chloe.”
The hairs on Ellery’s arms rose. “You know her?”
Jenna swallowed. “I’m her mother.”