The Silent Girl (36 page)

“That night, in the Red Phoenix, there was a witness,” he says. “Who was it?”

“Do you really think I would tell you?”

“So someone
was
there.”

“And will never forget.”

The sword digs deeper into my neck. “Tell me the name.”

“You’re going to kill me anyway. Why should I?”

A long pause, then he lifts the blade from my skin. “Let’s make
a deal,” he says calmly. “You tell me who this witness is. And I’ll tell you what happened to your daughter.”

I try to process what he’s just said, but the darkness suddenly spins around me and the floor seems to be dissolving beneath my feet. He sees my confusion and he laughs.

“You had no idea, did you, that this was always about her. Laura, wasn’t that her name? She was about fourteen years old. I remember her, because she was the first one I got to choose. Pretty little thing. Long black hair, skinny hips. And so trusting. It wasn’t hard to talk her into the car. She was carrying all those heavy books and her violin, and was grateful for the ride home. It was all so easy, because I was a friend.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Why would I lie?”

“Then tell me where she is.”

“First tell me who the witness is. Tell me who was in the Red Phoenix. Then I’ll tell you what happened to Laura.”

I am still struggling with this revelation, trying to understand why this man knows my daughter’s fate. She disappeared two years before my husband died in the shooting. I never imagined any connection between the events. I had believed that fate simply delivered a double blow, a karmic punishment for some cruelty I’d committed in a past lifetime.

“She was such a talented girl,” the smooth voice says. “That first day we rehearsed, I knew she was the one I wanted. Vivaldi’s Concerto for Two Violins. Do you remember her practicing that piece?”

His words are like a blast that hurls shrapnel through my heart because I know now that he’s telling the truth. He heard my daughter play. He knows what happened to her.

“Tell me the name of the witness,” he says.

“This is all I’ll tell you,” I say quietly. “You are a dead man.”

The blow comes without warning, so violent that it whips my head backward and my skull slams against the wall. Through the
roaring in my ears I hear him speaking to me, words that I don’t want to hear.

“She lasted seven, maybe eight weeks. Longer than the others. She looked delicate, but oh, she was strong. Think of it, Mrs. Fang. For two whole months, while the police were searching for her, she was still alive. Begging to go home to her mommy.”

My control shatters. I cannot stop the tears, cannot suppress the sobs that rack my body. They sound like an animal’s howls of pain, wild and alien.

“I can give you
closure
, Mrs. Fang,” he says. “I can answer the question that’s been tormenting you all these years. Where is Laura?” He leans in closer. Though I can’t see his face, I smell his scent, ripe with aggression. “Tell me what I want to know, and I’ll put your mind at rest.”

It happens before I even think about it, a feral reaction that surprises us both. He flinches away, gasping in disgust as he wipes my spit from his face. I fully expect that another blow will follow and I brace myself for the pain.

It does not come. Instead he bends down and picks up my tracking device, which he had earlier tossed to the floor. He waves it in my face. “Really, I don’t need you at all,” he says. “All I need to do is replace this battery and turn it on again. And I’ll just wait to see who shows up.”

He leaves the room. I hear the door swing shut, and footsteps thud up the stairs.

Grief is my only companion, gnawing with teeth so sharp that I cry and flail against the manacles, scraping skin from my wrists. He had my daughter. He kept her. I remember the nights after Laura vanished, when my husband and I clung to each other, neither daring to say what we were both thinking.
What if she is dead?
Now I realize there was a far worse possibility, something that we had not imagined: that she was still alive. That during those two months, as James and I felt hope die and acceptance take its place, our Laura was still breathing. Still suffering.

I slump back exhausted, and my screams fade to whimpers. The frenzy has left me numb. Leaning against the concrete wall, I try to reconcile what he has just told me with what I already know, which is this: Two years after my daughter’s abduction, my husband and four other people were massacred in the Red Phoenix restaurant. How could these events be related and what ties them together? This he never explained.

I struggle to remember everything he said, searching through the fog of grief for clues. One sentence suddenly comes back to me, words that instantly freeze the blood in my veins.

She lasted seven, maybe eight weeks. Longer than the others
.

My head lifts at the revelation.
The others
.

My daughter was not the only one.

W
HAT DID DETECTIVE INGERSOLL KNOW, AND WHY WAS HE
killed for it?

That was the question that consumed Jane as she sat late into the afternoon, sifting through her notes about Ingersoll’s murder. Spread across her desk were the crime scene photos of his residence, ballistic and trace-evidence reports, his cell phone and landline logs, and his bank card charges. According to Donohue, a death contract had gone out on Ingersoll weeks ago, right about the time when he began asking questions about missing girls. All the cases were old ones that had since dropped off the radar of departments across Massachusetts. She stared at a photo of Ingersoll’s body and thought: What monster did you awaken?

And what do missing girls have to do with the Red Phoenix?

She reached for the files on those missing girls. She was thoroughly familiar with the details of Laura’s and Charlotte’s disappearances, so she focused on the other three cases. All the victims were pretty and petite. All were good-to-excellent students. All were multitalented.

Patty Boles and Sherry Tanaka played in tennis tournaments.
Deborah Schiffer and Patty Boles participated in art fairs. Deborah Schiffer played the piano in her school orchestra. But none of the three knew one another, at least according to their parents. And they were different ages at the times of their disappearances. Sherry Tanaka was sixteen. Deborah Schiffer was thirteen. Patty Boles was fifteen. One in middle school, two in high school.

Jane thought about this for a moment. Remembered that Laura Fang was fourteen years old when she vanished.

She jotted down the order in which the girls disappeared.

Deborah Schiffer, age thirteen.

Laura Fang, age fourteen.

Patty Boles, age fifteen.

Sherry Tanaka, age sixteen.

Charlotte Dion, age seventeen.

It was like staring at a royal flush. Every year, a different girl, a different age. As if the kidnapper’s taste had matured as the years passed.

She reached for the folder with the last photos of Charlotte, taken at the double funeral of her mother and stepfather. Again she flipped through the sequence of images taken by the
Boston Globe
photographer. Charlotte looking pale and thin in her black dress, surrounded by mourners. Charlotte stumbling away toward the edge of the crowd as Mark Mallory, her stepbrother, stares in her direction. The photo where Charlotte and Mark are absent, and her father, Patrick, looks confused by the sudden abandonment. Finally she came to the last image, where both were back in the frame, Mark walking behind Charlotte. Tall and broad-shouldered, he could easily have overpowered his stepsister.

Every year, an older girl.

The year that thirteen-year-old Deborah Schiffer vanished was a year after Dina and Arthur Mallory married, forming a new and reconstituted family, with all the joint activities that this would have entailed. School assemblies. Orchestra performances. State tennis tournaments.

Is this how the victims were chosen? Through Charlotte?

Jane picked up the phone and called Patrick Dion.

“I’m sorry to bother you at dinnertime,” she said. “But would it be possible for me to take another look at Charlotte’s school yearbooks?”

“You’re welcome to come anytime. Has something new turned up?”

“I’m not sure.”

“What are you looking for, exactly? Perhaps I could help you.”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about Charlotte. About whether she’s the key to everything that’s happened.”

Over the phone, she heard Patrick give a mournful sigh. “My daughter has always been the key, Detective. To my life, to everything that’s ever mattered. There’s nothing I want more than to know what happened to her.”

“I understand, sir,” Jane said gently. “I know you want the answer, and I think I might be able to provide it.”

H
E ANSWERED THE DOOR
wearing a baggy pullover sweater, chino slacks, and bedroom slippers. Patrick’s face, like his sweater, was sagging and careworn, every crease etched deeply with old grief. And here was Jane to bring back the awful memories. For that she felt guilty, and when they shook hands, she held on longer than necessary, a grasp meant to tell him that she was sorry. That she understood.

He gave her a sad nod and led the way into the dining room, his slippers shuffling across the wood floor. “I have the yearbooks waiting for you,” he said, pointing to the volumes on the dining table.

“I’ll just bring these out to my car and be on my way. Thank you.”

“Oh dear.” He frowned. “If it’s all right, I’d rather you didn’t take them out of the house.”

“I promise I’ll look after them very carefully.”

“I’m sure you will, but …” He placed his hand on the stack of books, as though blessing a child. “This is what I have left of my daughter. And it’s hard, you know, to let any of it out of my sight. I
worry that they’ll get lost or damaged. That maybe someone will steal them from your car. Or you’ll have an accident and …” He paused and gave a rueful shake of his head. “That’s terrible of me, isn’t it? To value a stack of books so much that I I focus only on what happens to
them
. When they’re just cardboard and paper.”

“They’re worth more than that to you. I understand.”

“So if you could humor me? You’re perfectly welcome to sit here as long as you need and look through them. Can I get you something? A glass of wine?”

“Thanks, but I’m on duty. And I have to drive home.”

“Coffee, then.”

Jane smiled. “That would be wonderful.”

As Patrick went to the kitchen to make coffee, she sat down at the dining table and spread out the books. He had brought them all out, including the volumes from Charlotte’s elementary school years. She set those aside and opened the volume from Charlotte’s first year at the Bolton Academy, when she was a seventh grader. Her photo showed a fragile-looking blonde with braces on her teeth. The caption read:
CHARLOTTE DION. ORCHESTRA, TENNIS, ART
. Jane flipped through the book to the older students and found Mark Mallory’s photo in the sophomore high school class. He would have been fifteen then, and his interests were listed as orchestra, lacrosse, chess, fencing, drama. It was music that had brought them together, music that had changed the course of their lives and their families. The Dions and the Mallorys had met because of their children’s performances at school. They became friends. Then Dina left Patrick for Arthur, and nothing would ever be the same for them again.

“Here you are,” said Patrick, carrying in a tray with the coffeepot. He poured her a cup and set the sugar and cream on the table. “You must be hungry, too. I can make you a sandwich.”

“No, this is perfect,” she said, sipping hot coffee. “I had a late lunch, and I’ll eat supper when I get home.”

“You must have an understanding family.”

She smiled. “I have a husband who knew what he was getting
when he married me. Which reminds me.” She pulled out her cell phone and tapped out a quick text message to Gabriel:
HOME LATE. START DINNER WITHOUT ME
.

“Are you finding what you need here?” Patrick asked, nodding at the yearbooks.

She set down her phone. “I don’t know yet.”

“If you tell me what you’re looking for, I might be able to help.”

“I’m looking for connections,” she said.

“Between what?”

“Between your daughter. And these girls.” Jane opened the file she’d brought with her and pointed to the list of four names.

Patrick frowned. “I know about Laura Fang, of course. After Charlotte went missing, the police explored whether there was any connection. But these other girls, I’m afraid I’m not familiar with their names.”

“They didn’t go to Bolton, but like your daughter, they disappeared without a trace. From different towns, in different years. I’m wondering if Charlotte knew any of them. Maybe through music or sports.”

Patrick thought about this for a moment. “Detective Buckholz told me that children vanish all the time. Why are you looking at these girls in particular?”