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.”
HE 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?”
Because a dead man named Ingersoll pointed the way, thought Jane. What she said was: “These names have come up in the course of the investigation. There could turn out to be no connection at all. But if a link with Charlotte does exist, I might be able to find it right here.”
“In her yearbooks?”
She flipped through the student activity pages. “Look,” she said. “I noticed this the last time. The Bolton Academy’s very good about chronicling everything their students do, from school concerts to tennis meets. Maybe because it’s such a small student body.” She pointed to a page with photos of smiling students standing beside their science projects. The caption read: NEW ENGLAND SCIENCE FAIR, BURLINGTON, VERMONT, MAY 17. “With this documentation,” she said, “I’m hoping to reconstruct Charlotte’s school years. Where she was, what activities she participated in.” Jane looked at Patrick. “She played the viola. That’s how you got to know the Mallorys. At the kids’ musical performances.”
“How does that help you?”
Jane turned to the section for the music department. “Here. This was the year she first played in the orchestra.” She pointed to a group photo of the musicians, which included Charlotte and Mark. Below it was the caption: THE ORCHESTRA’S JANUARY CONCERT BRINGS A STANDING OVATION!
Just the sight of the photo made Patrick wince with what seemed like physical pain. He said softly, “It’s hard, you know. Looking at these photos. Remembering how …”
“You don’t need to do this, Mr. Dion.” Jane touched his hand. “I’ll go through these books on my own. If I have any questions, I’ll ask.”
He nodded, suddenly looking far older than his sixty-seven years. “I’ll leave you alone, then,” he said. Quietly he retreated from the dining room, sliding the pocket doors shut behind him.
Jane poured another cup of coffee. Opened another yearbook.
It was for
Charlotte’s eighth-grade year, when she would have been thirteen and Mark sixteen. His growth spurt was already under way, his photo now showing a square jaw and broad shoulders. Charlotte still had a child’s face, pale and delicate. Jane flipped through the school activities section, searching for photos of either one. She found both of them in a group portrait, taken at the statewide “Battle of the Orchestras,” March 20, in Lowell, Massachusetts.
Deborah Schiffer lived in Lowell, and she played the piano.
Jane stared at the image of Charlotte and her fellow musicians. Two months after that photo was taken, Deborah vanished.
Jane’s hand was humming with excitement and caffeine. She drained her coffee cup, poured another. Searched the volumes for Charlotte’s ninth-grade yearbook. She already knew what she would find when she flipped to the music section. To the photo of eight music students, posing with their instruments with the caption: BOLTON’S BEST QUALIFY FOR BOSTON SUMMER ORCHESTRA WORKSHOP. She did not see Charlotte in the photo, but there was Mark Mallory. By this time he was seventeen years old, darkly handsome, a boy who could turn the head of any teen girl. That year, Laura Fang had been fourteen. She, too, had attended the orchestra workshop in Boston. Had Laura been dazzled by one particular boy’s good looks and wealth, a boy for whom a girl of Laura’s humble upbringing would be invisible?
Or was Laura very much on his radar?
Jane’s throat felt parched, the buzzing in her head louder. She took another sip of coffee and reached for the next volume, Charlotte’s tenth-grade yearbook. When she opened it, the words seemed smudged, the faces indistinct. She rubbed her eyes, turned to the activities section. There, once again, was Charlotte in the orchestra with her viola. But Mark had graduated, and another boy stood behind the tympanies.
Jane turned to the athletics pages. Again she rubbed her eyes, trying to clear away the fog that seemed to hang over her vision. The photo moved in and out of focus, but she could still pick out Charlotte’s face in the lineup of tennis players. BOLTON TEAM TAKES SECOND PLACE AT OCTOBER’S REGIONALS.
Patty Boles was a tennis player, too, thought Jane. Like Charlotte, she was in her sophomore year. Had she competed at those regionals? Had she caught someone’s eye, someone who could easily learn who she was, and which school she attended?
Six weeks after that regional tournament, Patty Boles vanished.
Jane gave her head a shake, but the fog seemed to thicken before her eyes. Something is very wrong.
The distant jangle of a ringing phone penetrated the buzz in her ears. She heard Patrick talking. She tried to call for help, but no sound came out.
Struggling to her feet, she heard the chair topple over and crash to the floor. All feeling was gone from her legs; they were like wooden stilts, senseless and clumsy. She staggered toward the pocket doors, afraid that she’d collapse before she got there, that Patrick would find her on the floor in a humiliating heap. As she reached out toward the doors they seemed to recede, taunting her efforts, always just beyond her fingertips.
Just as she lurched toward them, they suddenly slid open, and Patrick appeared.
“Help me,” she whispered.
But he didn’t move. He simply stood watching her, his expression coldly dispassionate. Only then did she realize what a mistake she’d made. It was her last thought before she slumped unconscious at his feet.
SHE WAS THIRSTY, SO THIRSTY. JANE TRIED TO SWALLOW, BUT HER throat was parched, her tongue as dry as old leather against the roof of her mouth. Slowly she registered other sensations: the tingling in her left arm from lying too long in one position. The cold and gritty surface beneath her cheek. And the voice calling out to her, urgent and persistent. A woman’s voice that would not let her sleep but kept nagging, wheedling her back to consciousness.
“Wake up. You must wake up!”
Jane opened her eyes—or thought she did. The darkness she saw was so impenetrable that she wondered if she was trapped in the shadowy borderland between sleep and wakefulness, paralyzed but aware. Or was there another reason she could not move? She tried to roll onto her back and realized that her hands and feet were immobilized. She strained to free her wrists and met the unyielding resistance of duct tape. The floor beneath her cheek was concrete that bruised her hips and chilled straight through her clothes. She did not know how she’d come to be in this cold, black place. The last she remembered was sitting in Patrick’s dining room, paging through Charlotte’s yearbooks. Sipping coffee. Coffee that he served me.
“Detective Rizzoli! Please wake up!”
Jane recognized Iris Fang’s voice, and she turned her head toward the sound. “How … where …”
“I cannot help you. I’m here, against the wall. Chained to the wall. We are in a cellar, I think. Maybe in his house. I don’t know because I can’t remember how I got here.”
“Neither can I,” groaned Jane.
“He brought you here hours ago. We don’t have much time. He’s just waiting for the other one to return.”
The other one. Jane struggled to think through the lifting fog in her head. Of course Patrick was not working alone. At sixty-seven, he would need someone to help him with the strenuous tasks. That’s why he’d hired professionals to kill Ingersoll, to attack Iris.
“We have to prepare,” said Iris. “Before they come back.”
“Prepare?” Jane couldn’t help a desperate laugh. “I can’t move my arms or legs. I can’t even feel my hands!”
“But you can roll toward the wall. There’s a set of keys hanging near the door. I saw it when he turned on the light and brought you down here. They might unlock my handcuffs. You free me, then I’ll free you.”
“Which way is the door?”
“It’s to my right. Follow my voice. The keys are hanging on a hook. If you can get to your feet, grab the keys with your teeth—”
“That’s a lot of ifs.”
“Do it.” The command pierced the darkness, sharp as a blade. But the next words were soft. “He took my daughter,” she whispered, sobs suddenly stuttering through. “He’s the one.”
Jane listened to Iris crying in the darkness, and she thought of the other girls who’d vanished. Deborah Schiffer. Patty Boles. Sherry Tanaka. How many others had there been, girls whose names they did not yet know? Even his own daughter, Charlotte.
She fought against her bonds, but duct tape was indestructible, the favorite tool of MacGyver and serial killers alike. No amount of straining and twisting would tear those straps from her wrists.
“Don’t let him win,” said Iris. Her voice had steadied; the steel was back in it.
“I want him, too,” said Jane.
“The keys. You have to reach them.”
Already Jane was twisting, rolling across the floor. Her bruised hip banged against the concrete and she gasped, breathing deeply for a moment as the pain faded. Then it was another twist, another tumble across the floor. This time her face landed on the concrete, scraping her nose, banging her teeth. She rolled onto her unbruised side, knees drawn up in a fetal position, fighting tears of pain and frustration. How was she going to do this? She couldn’t even make it across the floor, much less rise to her feet and reach the keys.
“You have a daughter,” said Iris softly.
“Yes.”
“Think of her. Think of what you’d do to hold her again. To smell her hair, touch her face. Think. Imagine.”
That quiet command seemed to come from somewhere inside her own head, as if it were her own voice demanding action. She thought of Regina in the bathtub, slippery and sweet-smelling with soap, dark curls clinging to pink skin. Regina, who would grow into a young woman, never knowing her own mother except as a ghost reflected in her own face, her own features. And she thought of Gabriel, growing old and gray. A lifetime we’ll never have together if I don’t survive this night.
“Think of her.” Iris’s voice drifted through the darkness. “She’ll give you the strength you need to fight.”
 
; “Is that how you did it all these years?”
“It was all I had. It’s what kept me alive, the hope that my daughter might come home to me. I lived for that, Detective. I lived for the day I’d see her again. Or if it never happened, for the day I would see justice done. At least I’ll know that I died trying.”
Jane rolled again and her battered hip thumped against the floor, her face scraping across rough concrete. Suddenly her back collided with a wall and she lay on her side, panting, resting for what would be the next, and most difficult challenge. “I’ve reached the wall,” she said.
“Get to your feet. The door’s at the far end.”
With the wall as a support, Jane tried to squirm up to a kneeling position, but lost her balance and collapsed facedown, her mouth slamming against the floor. Pain shot straight from her teeth into her skull.
“Your daughter,” said Iris. “What is her name?”
Jane licked her lip and tasted blood. Felt the soft tissues already puffing up, swelling. “Regina,” she said.
“How old is she?”
“Two and a half.”
“And you love her very much.”
“Of course I do.” With a grunt, Jane struggled to her knees. She knew what Iris was doing; she could feel new strength in her muscles, new steel in her spine. No, she would not be kept away from her daughter. She would survive this night, the way Iris had survived these past two decades, because nothing mattered more to a mother than seeing her child again. She fought gravity, straining her back and neck to rise to a kneeling position.
“Regina,” said Iris. “She is the blood in your veins. The breath in your lungs.” Her voice was hypnotic, her words a whispered chant that sent heat rushing through Jane’s limbs. Words spoken in the universal language that every mother understands.
She is the blood in your veins. The breath in your lungs.
Get to your feet, Jane thought. Get those keys.
She rocked forward on her knees, coiling her muscles, and sprang up. Landed on her feet, but only for a few tottering seconds before she lost her balance and fell forward, her kneecaps slamming onto concrete.