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Ann sat on the couch. She opened the file and flipped through the pages. At the bottom of the stack were her dad’s phone records. The phone company must’ve responded to Sheriff McMichael’s subpoena and faxed them over. She scanned the list. Not a lot of activity. No outgoing calls for the past three months. Plenty of incoming calls from her number though.
She pushed the fax to the side and turned her attention back to Teresa’s file. She had already read what the station had on her. Her interest lay in the documents Joey had sent her, hacked straight from the source.
She started with the patient file from Teresa’s first admittance to a mental health institute.
Included within that set of documentation were the transcripts for three hypnotherapy sessions. Ann’s eyes devoured the transcripts. When she reached the end, she set the papers down and wished she had more beer.
Harmony’s Public Enemy #1: Teresa Hart.
Ann picked up the phone, but she realized she didn’t need to bother Derrick about this. He knew who he was married to. He had to. Besides, he was probably still on his way home from Mountain View, assuming that was the reason he didn’t pick Maggie up from school.
Teresa’s mother hadn’t committed suicide. She’d been murdered.
In session number three, fifteen-year-old Teresa confessed to killing her mother. She’d fabricated a story to cover it up as a suicide. In a delusion brought on by overwhelming guilt, she had convinced herself the story was true.
How the hell did she get out?
Ann flipped to the back of the stack, but there were no discharge papers included in the file.
She settled in with the documents from Mountain View. This time Teresa was admitted for manic-depressive behavior and as part of her sentence for neglecting her child. It corroborated the story Derrick told her the other night, except for one thing. Their baby was found under the giant teddy bear, not pressed against the crib bumper like Derrick said. Did he remember wrong?
Ann got up to retrieve the spiced rum from the freezer, but halted. Something about the discharge papers didn’t sit right—something about one of the signatures at the bottom.
She rushed back to the table and sorted through the papers again until she found it.
The discharge papers were signed by the attending psychiatrist, Dr. Gail Park.
Ann knew the name. She had seen it somewhere in the past few days. She closed her eyes and tried to envision where.
She jumped to her feet, and a prickle went through her body. It was in the journal from the storage unit—and on the adoption certificate.
Ann grabbed the certificate. The signature matched. She flipped open the journal to the pages toward the back. Gail Park was in the collection of signatures. She compared them. They matched. But what did it mean? Why was her signature in her dad’s journal? Who was she?
She looked at the other page full of scribbled words. She ran her hand over them, feeling the texture from the pen’s pressure with her fingertips.
“Summon the angel,” Ann whispered. She frowned. It didn’t sound right. Because it wasn’t. All her life he told her to summon your angel, not the angel.
Summon the angel. It is the key. Her dad’s voice from the video came to her.
Ann scrutinized the words on the journal page letter by letter until an odd letter stood out. About a third of the way down the page he’d written, “SUMMON THE ANGET.”
She scanned the rest of it and found more instances in which a letter was replaced: SUMMON THE ANGLL and SUMMOM THE ANGEL. Heart pounding, Ann went back to the top and started circling the misplaced letters. She wrote them down and sat back with defeat. It was a bunch of nonsense.
TLMYWFZHMLCGVV
She checked again, just to make sure she didn’t miss anything, then tried to unscramble the words, but there were no vowels.
“Think, Ann, think.” She counted the number of letters, fourteen. Then counted them in the catch phrase. Fourteen again. Goosebumps broke out on her arms.
“Summon the angel. It is the key.” The small key to her dad’s lockbox had been taped to the opposite page. She grabbed the items from the box and shuffled through them and found the tabula recta.
She held up the slip of paper she’d written the random letters on. “If summon the angel is the key, then this has to be the cipher.”
A cold prickle ran over her. She set the tabula recta on the table, found the first letter of the key, S, and went down until she hit the first letter of the cipher. Then she followed the line to the left. The first letter in the solution was B. She kept going until she had: BRAM IS.
Alive? Dead?
There were too many letters left. She forced herself to slow down. Her hand shook when she trailed the pencil across the grid to find the next letters. She moved to the next one, and the next, until the message revealed itself.
BRAM IS GAIL PARK.
I took care of both records.
Her father’s voice from the video replayed in her mind once again.
Bram is Gail Park—her father had signed Teresa’s discharge papers.