Reed awoke to a strange sensation of cognitive dissonance. He had been sleeping soundly, yet daylight streamed in around the edges of the window shade. Outside the room, the voices that had awoken him were achingly familiar: his wife and daughter, chatting happily about a topic he could not discern. The cadence of their words, their musical back-and-forth rhythm with Tula’s giggle as a bubbly grace note, transported him instantly back to his old home. Meanwhile, he had Ellery asleep next to him, her body curled into his with her injured arm cradled protectively between them. He knew it was the drugs that had created this complete surrender in her, but he allowed himself a few minutes to enjoy the feel of her bony knees against his hairy leg and her warm breath fanning across his arm.
When his phone buzzed on the nightstand, he reached over to check it and found he had fifty-seven new messages. Time to get up. He eased out of the bed without waking Ellery from her dead sleep, took a quick shower, and went in search of the voices from the other side of the door. The smell of chocolate hit him the moment he opened it, and he discovered Tula and Ashley frosting a crooked cake at the kitchen island. Bump’s long nose reared up to snuffle dangerously close to the edge, but no one else seemed to notice a giant hound on the prowl. “Down, boy,” Reed ordered, and they all turned to look at him. The dog ambled over to lick his bare feet.
“It lives,” Sarit remarked dryly.
“Sorry.”
“It’s no bother. The girls baked you and Ellery a cake as a congratulations on solving your case. Of course, they only had me and the internet for instruction, so there you have it.” She waved at the lopsided confection.
Reed dropped a kiss on Tula’s head. “I love it,” he declared.
Ashley frowned at her attempt to make a pink rose. “Do you think Ellery will like it?”
“Ellery will devour it whole.”
Pleased, the girls returned to finishing up their work while Reed and Sarit had a side conversation in the living room. “It’s all over the news,” she told him. “Chloe’s parents made an appearance outside their home so the world knows the truth. It’s an incredible story, Reed. You saved that girl.”
“Ellery did. With maybe an assist from a seventeen-year-old acrobat.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Never mind.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Thank you for staying with the girls.”
“I see it now. It’s the victories that keep you coming back, no? Chloe’s home. She’s okay. Her parents must think you all are miracle workers.”
He wondered if this was a side dig at his relationship with Ellery. “It matters even when they don’t come home alive.” Coben likely had other victims they didn’t know about, girls he’d disappeared and carved up and refused to say where they were now. As long as he kept them secret, the dead belonged to him.
“Speaking of home, I need to get back there. So does Tula, as her school starts up again next week.”
“Yes, I know. We have tickets to fly back tomorrow.”
She bit her lip, hesitant. “If you’d like, I can take her back with me tonight. This way you could stay here longer with Ellery. It seems like she might need someone to help her until her shoulder heals up.”
Reed widened his eyes with surprise. “That would be kind of you—presuming you take Tula only as far as Virginia.”
“God, Reed, I’m not planning to kidnap her.” She gave a small shudder. “Don’t even joke about such a thing.”
“I’m sorry. You have to understand that it’s not a joke to me, Sarit. I won’t let you move her half a country away from me without a fight.” He kept his voice low, but his intent was serious.
“Yes, yes, message received,” she replied, her palms up, and he decided that would have to be good enough for now. He heard the bedroom door open and close and Ellery appeared from around the corner, her hair a hopeless tangle and the triangular imprint of a pillow corner on her flushed cheek.
“Do I smell cake?” she asked.
“Yes!” Tula cried, thrusting her butter knife in the air. “Now we can eat it!”
Reed served them each a piece, congratulating the girls on an admirable first effort. “It’s not as good as the ones Daddy bakes,” Tula confided to Ellery. “He made me one shaped like a volcano for my last birthday, with red lava running down the side and everything.”
“Oh, yeah? He made me one for my birthday, too,” Ellery replied, meeting Reed’s gaze over Tula’s head. He smiled at her in shared memory of the dark chocolate with lavender butter cream frosting concoction they’d shared at the end of an intimate dinner in this very kitchen. She had accused him once of being the man who caught the monster and then went home, never having to deal with the jagged holes the monster’s claws left behind. Ellery bore those marks on her body and on her life, with the locks on her door and the scars on her skin and her usual refusal to celebrate her birthday, the day of her abduction. She was right that he would never fully understand. He couldn’t climb into the darkness with her. But he could stand in the light and extend his hand and wait patiently to see if she would join him.
She smiled back at him and stuck the fork in her mouth, licking the frosting off with relish. Reed grinned and figured the odds of winning her over had to be in his favor.
His side had the cake.
Reed sat on the sofa, sorting through his messages. Tula and Sarit had left for Virginia, and Ellery and Ashley were headed out to the wharf. “She should see something besides the inside of my apartment,” Ellery had said as she winced her way back into her sling.
“But your ankle,” he’d protested.
“Also wants to get out of this apartment. We’ll sit on a bench and look at the ocean.”
She paused with her keys in hand on the way out the door and looked to where Speed Bump lay sprawled under Reed’s feet. “You’re using my dog as a footrest.”
He didn’t look up from his phone. “It was his idea. My feet were here first. I can’t help it if he’s wedged his way under them.”
“Well, at least you can’t make him smell any worse,” she replied. “We’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
Reed might have said something in return, but he couldn’t be sure. His attention diverted to an email message from the Baltimore PD in response to a ballistic test he had asked them to run. The bullet that was recovered from Carol’s husband was too degraded to run any conclusive analysis to a specific weapon, but its caliber matched the Beretta recovered from the Stone house. Reed pondered if there might be another way to connect them while he continued through his email messages. He sat up in surprise as he reached one from People magazine.
Let us tell your love story, the subject line read. Inside he found a plea from an editor who wanted to interview him and Ellery about their romance. Their readers would be delighted to share in his happiness—it could even be a cover story. Reed snapped the window shut with nauseated horror. Just reading the note made him feel like he was at the end of a fish-eye lens. My love story is none of your goddamn business. Ellery wouldn’t even say the words to him. They thought she’d somehow sit for an interview? This, he realized with guilty regret, was a mess partly of his own making. He’d written the book on Ellery. He’d sold her story to the masses years ago and still they hungered for more. Their appetite for her, for Coben, felt boundless, and he found himself on the receiving end of the bite. Furious, he opened his laptop and tapped out a heated reply: Not interested. Don’t contact me again.
He sat back, still stewing. He wanted to punch someone but feared it was his own face that deserved the fist. Moreover, he had two murders that remained unsolved, contributing to the churn he felt in his gut. Bump jumped up and flopped on the couch next to him, his chin on Reed’s arm. “I have a gun and a dead body, but I can’t connect them with forensics,” he told the dog. “What do you suggest?”
Bump rolled over, offering his belly.
“I don’t think that will quite do it.” Reed gave him an absent-minded scratch. When his fingers trailed off, Bump whined, got down from the couch, and trotted across the room. He stuck his head in a magazine rack and emerged with a half-chewed bone in his mouth, which he brought back and laid at Reed’s feet. “That’s disgusting,” Reed told him, and Bump wagged with enthusiasm, accepting this as a compliment. “How long have you had that thing stashed over there?”
Bump nosed the bone, trying to get Reed to throw it. Reed complied with a sigh. As Bump raced after the skidding bone, Reed sat up ramrod straight. “Wait,” he said. “You just might have something there.”
Bump grumbled his displeasure when Reed declined to chase him for the bone. He flopped down with a noisy protest while Reed hunted down a phone number for the woman who had, until now, been a footnote in this whole complicated affair. He said a silent prayer that she could help him while the number rang through to Irma Goodwin of Baltimore, Maryland. “Yes, hello?” Her voice had the thin, creaky quality of the very aged.
“Mrs. Goodwin, my name is Reed Markham, and I am an agent with the FBI.”
“The FBI? Has something happened?”
“Do you recall telling the Baltimore police about your husband’s gun being stolen years ago?”
“Yes, it was a Beretta 92. But I don’t know who took it or when. I explained all that to the nice young man from the police who came to ask me about it.”
“Your husband kept it in the closet? In a shoe box, is that correct?”
“Yes, the bedroom closet. That’s right.”
“Ma’am, at any point have you engaged a cleaning service?”
She let out a gravelly chuckle. “A cleaning service? What do you think this is, Park Avenue? Mercy, no. I scrubbed all our floors and toilets myself. Still do, thank you very much.”
Reed closed his eyes, his hopes fading. “I don’t suppose you knew a Carol Frick socially then. Maybe through church or something like that?” The two women were different generations and lived in different parts of the city. If they’d crossed paths some other way, it would be hard to imagine where.
“Carol Frick, did you say?”
“That’s right.”
“A redhead, wasn’t she? A little bitty thing. Yes, I remember now. We had a terrible ice storm—gosh, it must have been about twenty years ago—and I slipped on the back steps while taking out the garbage. I broke my left leg and was out of commission for six weeks. The neighbors chipped in to hire a woman to come tidy up the place a few times while I was stuck on the couch, and her name was Carol Frick.”
Reed made a fist of victory. Here was the last puzzle piece. He just had to fit them all together now. “Thank you, Mrs. Goodwin. It would be helpful to know the exact dates that Carol Frick came to your house. Do you think you can find that out?”
He heard her wooden chair slide out from the table. “I keep all the old calendars. Let me check them for you.”
He waited, convinced this had to be it. He heard her footsteps and the clunk of the phone against the table as she picked it back up. “It was twenty-one years ago this winter,” she said. “Does that help?”
Reed did some quick mental math. “Yes, I believe it does.”