"You have him in there, don't you?" Mary, Haley's mom asked. "You have Mr. Meckler."
Jack exhaled. "Now, let's not get ahead of ourselves…"
"Is it true her fingers were in the letter?" Mary continued. "They cut off her fingers?"
"What do they want?" Britney's mom, Jessica, asked. "A ransom? Because I'll give them anything if they'll just keep my daughter's fingers attached to her hand. I'll sell everything I have if need to."
Jack exhaled again. "We don't know yet. There have been no demands so far for a ransom."
"And the letter? Can you trace the letter?" a reporter asked. Her cameraman had been in Jacks' face while he spoke to the concerned parents, probably making excellent emotional TV the way they liked it. I knew how these people thought and suddenly felt ashamed for being one of them. It didn't feel good to be the one on the other side of it.
"We will try our best," Jack answered and tried to make his way through the crowd.
"Are you getting any answers out of Mr. Meckler yet?" Emmy's dad, John said. "You have my permission to torture him if needed."
A couple of the parents agreed and chimed in with a yeah, give him whatever is needed, or do what it takes.
Jack shook his head. "There will be no such thing. Besides, we don't even know if he is involved in any way so far."
"How can you be certain?" the reporter asked. "You've interviewed him several times since the kidnapping happened. Will you say that he had nothing to do with it or is he still your main suspect?"
"There'll be a news conference later on where we'll explain everything we can at this point in the investigation," Jack said, trying to get her off his back, but it didn't work.
"Would you say that you have no leads, then? No suspects? Or are you holding back from these poor parents trying to find out where their kids are?"
"No," Jack said shaking his head. I could tell he wasn't used to having the media in his face like this. "I am…we're doing all we can."
"You keep saying that, Jack, but where's my girl?" Emmy's dad yelled. "I can't just sit at home and wait to receive her fingers in the mail. I demand action. I want her back, now!"
"What is your response to these poor parents?" the reporter said.
Jack stopped and looked at her. I could tell he was about to say something I feared he was going to regret later on, so I grabbed his arm and pulled him away from her and through the crowd.
"Don't say another word," I said. "They'll only use it against you."
36
May 2018
"She hasn't come back. What do you think happened to her?"
A couple of girls were talking behind Alicia as she sat on the mattress and stared at the metal plate above them where Alondra had disappeared the day before. It had been a long night inside the box truck. Barely any of them had said a word. All they could hear all night was the sound of Emmy throwing up.
"You think they sent her home?" The girl named Trudy asked. Her voice had a little ray of hope in it, but it didn't last long.
Alicia didn't know her well but knew she was in fourth grade, one grade level below her. Alicia didn't like to think about what had happened to Alondra, who used to be her best friend, but still, she couldn't stop. Was it really possible that they sent her home?
"Of course, they didn't send her home," the girl named Britney said. She was also a fourth grader, and Alicia believed she was in the same class as Trudy but wasn't sure.
"Th-then what did they do to her?" Trudy asked, her voice wavering in uncertainty.
No one knew the answer to that nor did anyone even try and bring a comforting one. Alicia feared the worst and she guessed so did the rest of them. She felt like crying when thinking about it, so she tried not to, but it was hard, almost impossible not to imagine what had happened to her. Alicia felt bad. She loved Alondra and missed her so much. Every day, she had hoped that Alondra would stop hanging out with Tonya and return to be with Alicia again like they used to be. Was it too late now?
It can't be. There's so much we haven't done together. We were going to make slime together, remember? We were going to do it in my yard since your mom wouldn't have it anywhere near her house. My mom had finally caved in and said yes if it stayed outside. That was all before you left me for Tonya, and we never got to it, remember?
Alicia sniffled and wiped a tear away from her cheek. All night long, she had waited and sort of expected to see Alondra come back. Maybe they would have beaten her, maybe even badly, but at least she was…still…at least she was still…
"They killed her, didn't they?" Trudy then said, her lower lip shuddering as she said the words.
A shiver of fear rushed through the burning hot box truck.
"Hey, we don't know that," Julie yelled. She was still caring for Nikki, who didn't seem to be getting any better. "For all we know, they sent her home, okay?"
No one agreed with her because no one believed it. They had all looked into the barrels of those guns; they had all pleaded for their lives and seen how they looked at them when they asked to go to the restroom. They saw it in their eyes behind those nasty skin-colored pantyhose that distorted their faces.
They didn't care.
37
June 1999
Barely out of the hospital, Jane found herself in a shelter for women. She had no money and nowhere else to go. The people at the shelter gave her a room with a small kitchen so she could take care of herself and the children. Jane couldn't remember ever being more relieved than she was at the moment she closed the door and sat down on the couch. No more walking on eggshells; no more fearing what mood he was in when he came home; no more terrified hours wondering what he was going to do next. Now, it was just her and the kids.
It was all she needed.
Within days of arriving at the shelter, Jane had a visitor. A lady who presented herself as Colleen West, a caseworker with the Children's Protection Services came to her door and knocked. She let her inside, and they sat down on the small hard couch that came with the room.
Colleen was a small woman with glasses and wore a grey cardigan over her pink turtleneck. She looked more like a librarian to Jane with her hair in a bun and everything, but she seemed nice and had a friendly smile, so when she asked Jane to tell her the entire story, she did. She told her about Bob and how he had grown worse over the years, and how she had to get away from him in the end. She even told her how he had hit poor Anna, but Colleen had already heard that from the hospital.
"And you were pretty badly beaten as well, I heard," she said and placed a hand on top of Jane's.
Jane cried and nodded, letting her emotions out for the first time in a very long time, and for the first time, she felt like someone actually wanted to listen. Colleen seemed actually to care.
"It must have been very rough for all of you. You did the right thing in leaving him."
Jane sighed, relieved, and wiped her eyes with a tissue that Colleen handed her. She was so filled with guilt and doubt since he was, after all, the father of her children.
"On the good days, when he was in a good mood, we actually had a great marriage," she said for some reason, maybe to justify her choice not to have left him earlier. "It was just those…other days and you never knew when they would hit. He would come home from work and be all over me because I had made something for dinner he didn't care for, or if he thought I had been on the phone with my friend Annabelle. He kept track of the calls made from the phone in our house. I couldn't even call my mother. He would tell me I had changed and that something was different about me when I had. He believed my mother was trying to get me to leave him, that she somehow had this power over me to make me do stuff like that…but the reality was that I wanted to leave him, I just didn't know how to."
"Maybe he sensed that's what you wanted and that was actually what he feared the most," she said, then looked around and spotted the kids. Three of them, Vanessa, Penelope, and Elisa were all playing quietly, while Matthew was sleeping
in a chair. Only Anna wasn't doing anything. She was sitting by the window, staring out of it, not saying a word or even playing.
"Mind if I talk to her for a little?" Colleen asked.
Jane shook her head. "Of course not. She's been struggling since it happened."
Colleen sent her another sympathetic smile before approaching the girl. "It's only natural."
38
May 2018
Jack showed me to his desk, then asked if I wanted coffee and left. I sat down in a chair and looked at the pictures of his family in the middle of all his mess. Between him and Shannon, they had a lot of children. One mutual boy, twins that Jack had brought along with an adopted daughter, and a daughter that Shannon had brought to the equation. She was a famous country singer but, coming from Denmark, I didn't know much about country music, so I had no idea who she was before I met her.
"So, how's the family?" I asked as he returned with my coffee. "How's your daughter?"
Jack sighed and sat down. He rubbed his head, then shook it. "Not well. She's still struggling."
I knew his adoptive daughter, Emily, struggled with anorexia and had been admitted to a place that knew how to deal with it, but once she got out, she continued starving herself. She had just gotten better at hiding it from them. Shannon had told me about it once when we had them all over for dinner.
"I’m sorry to hear that," I said, sending him a compassionate smile. "I hope she'll get better soon."
"Yeah, well, you and me both. It's a process, though."
I sipped my coffee, the nagging sensation of worry growing inside me as I thought about my own daughter. It was hard to remain calm with what I had seen this morning.
Jack asked me to repeat everything I had told him earlier, and he wrote it all down while I spoke. I was in the middle of a sentence when I heard someone yell from the interrogation rooms. I looked up and into Jack's eyes.
He shook his head. "He's not exactly cooperating."
"Mr. Meckler?"
Jack drank from his cup that read WORLD'S BEST FARTER on the side of it. Putting it down, he nodded. There was more yelling, and I recognized Mr. Meckler's voice.
"I’ve told you a million times. I don't know anything. I don't know where those kids are! Please, just let me go. PLEASE!"
I stared in the direction of the sound and started to bite my nails. I felt such deep anger and resentment rising inside of me thinking that, in there, only a few yards from me sat the man who might have my kid, who might know where she was. The guy had to be somehow involved in all this, right? I felt convinced he was. Why couldn't he just break down and tell us everything?
I turned my head back and looked at Jack, who seemed to be lost in his thoughts as well.
"How are we on the kids who were also waiting for the bus? What are they saying?" I asked.
Jack scoffed. "Nothing so far. Some remember Mr. Meckler talking to some of the girls, while others say they saw Mrs. Baker talking to them."
"What about that tip?" I then asked.
"What tip?"
"Yesterday when I talked to you on the phone, someone came up to you and told you there was a tip you needed to look at."
"Ah, that." He shook his head and drank more coffee. "That was nothing."
"It must have been something if you rushed to check it out, right?"
Jack took in a deep breath and looked at me, scrutinizing me. "You really don't give up, do you. Mrs. Franck? Is that the reporter in you?"
"Maybe. Or the mother who desperately wants answers."
He nodded. "Fair enough. I guess there’s no harm in telling you. It was a tip from someone telling us about some strange activity out at the quarry inland, a place called White Rock. But we went there, and there was nothing."
"What kind of strange activity?" I asked.
"People hanging out there. Cars. A guy who walked his dog nearby every day told us there was never usually anyone there, but lately, he had seen people there. My guess is that he witnessed a drug deal go down, but that’s not what we're investigating right now. We went there, and there was nothing to see. It was a dead end. No trace of our girls."
Once Jack was done taking my statement, I said goodbye to him with a hug, and once again he promised me he was going to find Julie alive, but this time I found that I felt it harder to believe him. As I walked down the hallway toward the exit, the door to the interrogation room opened up, and two officers were leading out Mr. Meckler. I held my breath as he walked past, the eyes of a raving madman glaring down at me.
39
May 2018
They had set up a Crisis Psychologist and Family Support Center at the parking lot next to Juice N' Java. I went to get myself a sandwich for lunch but ended up talking to a lot of the other parents who had sought out help there. A woman who spoke with a very calm voice approached me and asked me if I needed to talk.
"I'm good," I said. It wasn't that I didn't want to talk; it was more because I knew that once I opened up, I was afraid I wouldn't be able to shut it off again.
A guy was sitting in a chair, and they were taking his blood pressure. He pushed a woman away, yelling at her:
"I don't need you to check my darn blood pressure. I just need my daughter back!"
The tension was visible on all the faces and I thought that maybe it would be better if everyone just went home. But then again, I realized I didn't even want to go home. I couldn't stand the thought of sitting there waiting for my phone to ring. And I certainly didn't want to go home and empty the mailbox and find my daughter's fingers in some creepy letter.
That was when I spotted Mrs. Baker. She was sitting in a chair, talking to one of the parents, comforting her, talking and smiling, putting a hand on the poor mother's arm. The mother thanked her with a long hug, then left.
"Mrs. Baker," I said and approached her, leaning on my crutch.
"Rebekka," she said and got up. She gave me a warm motherly hug. She looked me in the eyes. "How are you holding up, you poor thing?"
"I…well not too good, I have to admit."
Mrs. Baker shook her head. "It's is incomprehensible. All of it. Those poor girls and now with that…letter." She whispered the last word like it was a curse word.
"I know. I was there when Nancy got it," I said and sat down next to Mrs. Baker.
"That must have been awful, sweetheart. I am so sorry. I can only imagine how all of you must be feeling. I’ve known the kids for years and treated them all for scraped knees or checked them for lice over the years. I feel terrible. I can't believe he would have done such a thing."
"You mean Mr. Meckler?" I asked.
She nodded. "I didn't know that bus wasn't supposed to be there. How could I? Our job was to get the kids on the buses, and that's what we did. How could I have known what he was up to?"
She gave me a sad look. "I just can't believe that nice man could have taken all those girls. And then sending a letter with the girl's…fingers in it and that rhyme. What is that even supposed to mean? Ten Little Injuns?"
My eyes met hers as she said the words, and something struck inside me. The choice of the nursery rhyme couldn't be just a random thing, could it? Did it mean something? Was it a message from the kidnapper?
"It's a riddle," I said.
"What's that, sweetheart?"
"The rest of the verse is missing. It's a riddle," I repeated, then got up with my phone in my hand. As I thanked Mrs. Baker, I walked away, Googling the lyrics to Ten Little Injuns with the one hand that wasn't holding a crutch.
40
June 1999
At first, she thought the knock on her door was part of her dream, but as it grew louder and harder, Jane realized there was actually someone at her door. She blinked and looked at her watch.
"Who knocks on someone's door at two a.m.?"
Jane was still at the shelter, so she assumed it had to be one of the other residents and not someone from the outside. It couldn't be Bob, could it? She opened the door.
r /> "Colleen?"
Colleen wasn't alone. She had two police officers with her and a note in her hand that she showed Jane.
"This is not a social call. This is an inspection," she said. "I will let you know that you're being investigated for abuse and neglect."
Thinking she had to be still dreaming or at least hearing Colleen wrong, Jane stared at the woman, baffled.
"Excuse me, what?"
Colleen walked straight into the kitchen and looked into the fridge. After that, she went through all the cabinets and stopped at the dirty dishes in the sink. Then she wrote something on her notepad.
"Colleen? I don't understand…what is…?"
"Where are the children?" Colleen asked, approaching her again.
"Well, they're sleeping, of course."
"Then wake them up."
"Wake them up? Why? I don't understand? Colleen, what's going on? Can you please tell me what's happening?"
"I need to check them for bruises and marks. Please have them get out of bed," she said, her voice as cold as steel.
"No," Jane said. "I don't want to wake up my kids in the middle of the night. It's hard enough for them to sleep as it is after all they’ve been through. You can check them in the morning if it's that important."
Colleen turned on her heel and stared at Jane. "You're making me nervous here. It is my responsibility to make sure these kids are safe. It is my job, and I take it very seriously. If I miss even a small trace that could have told me your kids are being abused, then it will be my responsibility if they end up in the hospital or…dead."
"My kids aren't being abused," Jane said. "I was."
"And Anna," Colleen said.
"Yes, by her dad, but we moved away from him, remember? We left."