“You want to explore, don’t you?” Catherine said. “Come on.”
She opened the back door and the cat ran out into the night. Catherine walked to the alley behind her house and lifted the top to the large plastic garbage can to drop the bag inside. The cat was at her side again.
“Not feeling adventurous tonight? Go find a mouse.”
But the cat was unusually needy this evening, not wanting to leave Catherine’s side. Catherine sensed something ominous as she stood in the alley. The cat hissed into the night.
“What’s wrong? What do you see out there?”
The cat hissed once more before darting from Catherine’s side, swallowed quickly by the black night. As Catherine squinted into the darkness, feet shuffled behind her. She turned quickly, startled. Their eyes met and she let out a short scream, which was quickly stifled by his hand.
CHAPTER 35
Chicago, November 3, 2019
GRETA SCHREIBER LAY IN BED, EYES CLOSED AND IN A WILD STATE OF dementia. Her mind flashed with images from the past. Quick bursts of colorful mirages from a previous life.
“Where is she?” a voice came from the darkness.
“I tried to save you,” Greta said. “There was too much blood.”
The farmhouse flickered in her mind. The makeshift delivery room. Angela lying on the bed. The blood. The doubt. The terror.
A grave worry filled Greta’s chest, now like it had that day.
“Where is she?” the voice asked again.
“We have to go to the hospital,” Greta said. “Something’s wrong. There’s too much blood.”
“I’ll ask one more time,” the voice said from the darkness. “You picked her up from the psychiatric hospital. I know she came to you for help. Where is she now?”
Greta opened her eyes. The farmhouse disappeared, replaced by a hospital room, a blue glowing television, and a looming figure standing over her bed. The figure leaned closer so that his face was inches from hers.
“Where. Is. She.”
Greta blinked. Her mind cleared. She knew the face in front of her. She’d seen him on the news all those years ago. He was older now than when she had watched updates of his conviction on television while Angela sat next to her. Older than the photos that had appeared in the papers. But she was sure it was him. It was not a surprise that he was here, nor was this day unexpected. Frank had worried about it for years and had voiced his concern to Greta many times.
“Last time,” the man said. “Where is—”
“Nowhere.” Greta’s voice was gravelly and inaudible.
The man leaned closer so that his ear was close to her lips. The blue glow of the television disappeared from Greta’s vision when the man bent over her.
“Again,” he said.
“Nowhere you’ll ever find her. Nowhere you’ll ever go.”
The blue light came back as the man stood up. Then it quickly disappeared again. Greta felt the pillow press against her face. She kept her arms at her sides and never tried to resist. Her mind drifted off.
I tried to save you. There was too much blood.
CHAPTER 36
Chicago, November 4, 2019
IT HAD BEEN MORE THAN FORTY-EIGHT HOURS SINCE HER PANIC ATTACK and Rory was starting to feel her body balance itself. The sleep had helped, and now she was ready to face the source of her angst. Greta was linked to Angela Mitchell, and Rory had finally made it to the nursing home to ask her about it. Camille Byrd’s Kestner doll lay in its box on the passenger seat. It would be good ammunition for when Rory asked Greta the tough questions she had planned. Rory would not let her off the hook today. Today she needed answers. She needed to understand the mysterious veil that had fallen over her life, a web that connected everyone she loved to a woman who supposedly died forty years ago.
As she pulled into the lot, Rory saw red flashing lights from an ambulance and fire truck that were parked in the turnabout in front of the building. Greta had been a resident here long enough that red lights and sirens were routine for Rory. Throughout nearly every resident’s tenure, they suffered some sort of medical crisis that required a trip to the hospital. Emergency vehicles parked out front were a daily ritual.
Rory walked in front of the fire truck, whose engine was roaring. In the lobby, she scribbled her name into the visitor log and paused as she went through the process of printing Greta’s name and room number, and then signing her own along the narrow line. Rory had gone through the routine so many times over the years that the practice had attached itself to the image of her aging great-aunt sitting in her room and staring at the blue light of the television. But something caught her attention as she stared at the visitor log today. A vague, subconscious intuition made her hesitate as she penned her name. Before she had a chance to decipher the premonition, Greta’s nurse appeared in the corner of Rory’s eye. She was walking in a hurried fashion, an urgency to her pace. Rory looked up from the sign-in sheet, dropped the pen to the floor. Things slowed. The rushing nurse took on an underwater motion, her hair flowing behind her in slow motion.
Rory felt the woman take her hand, her eyes dripping with sympathy.
“I’m afraid your aunt has passed, Rory.”
Rory blinked as the world caught up and began again in real time. The noises of the lobby came back to her. The people moved around her with normal gaits and at a normal speed. The framed picture on the lobby wall blinked red with the flashing lights outside.
“She was perfectly happy when she went to sleep last night,” the nurse said. “We found her this morning. She passed overnight. Peacefully and with no distress.”
Rory stood still and offered no reply, the Kestner doll secured under her arm.
“Would you like to see her?”
Rory nodded. She would.
CHAPTER 37
Chicago, November 4, 2019
RORY LAY IN BED, SHE COULDN’T SHAKE THE IMAGE OF THE ZIPPER pulling the gap in the body bag together, Aunt Greta’s face disappearing. With it, a part of Rory vanished, too. She had fought against it when Celia called a month ago to tell Rory that her father was dead. And she battled to prevent it when she walked into her childhood home and was assaulted by memories of a life gone by. She tried to resist again tonight, but had no chance of stopping the tears this time. She cried like she never remembered doing as a child, and had certainly never done as an adult.
It wasn’t that Rory Moore didn’t feel the emotions of pain or sadness, she did. But those things affected her differently than they affected most. Those sensations altered her mood and changed her thinking. They pulled her back from interactions and made her want to hide from the world. They made her want to be alone. Rarely, however, did pain cause the socially accepted form of bereavement—hysterical crying. Tonight was one of those rare occasions. Rory lay on her side, head sunk in the pillow, and wept.
So many things were gone. Greta had been Rory’s last living relative. Besides Lane Phillips, Rory loved no one else in this world. But the anguish she felt now carried another significance. In addition to the end of her lineage, gone, too, was Rory’s chance for answers about the adoption papers. About Frank and Marla Moore. About her summers at the farmhouse. About her true relationship to Greta. And about Greta’s link to Angela Mitchell. Ever since Rory started reconstructing her death, the mysterious woman seemed to be tied to everything in Rory’s life. It was a connection that felt otherworldly, stronger than the usual relationship Rory developed with the victims of the crimes she reconstructed. And so it was that on the night Greta died, she could think of nothing but Angela Mitchell.
Regret was her companion as Rory closed her eyes, seasoning the tears that ran down her cheeks to soak the pillow. Soon sleep was pulling her. She surrendered easily to it, because within the slumber was something else: the familiar lure she had known as a child, the temptation that had drawn her from bed and ushered her to the prairie behind the farmhouse, where she once found peace. Tonight, though, as her eyes fluttered
under her lids, she recognized that it was someone different that pulled her mind. Still, it was irresistible.
* * *
It was dark and quiet when Rory walked into Grant Park. The Chicago skyline shined in the distance, intermittent windows lit yellow in the skyscrapers that were set against a black sky. Rory squinted against the darkness. She walked past Buckingham Fountain and to the cobblestone path flanked by birch trees until she came to the clearing where Camille Byrd’s body had been found nearly two years prior. The girl was there now, sitting alone in the grassy knoll. The halogen bulb of a lamppost highlighted her body. A brick wall in the background caught her shadow. She looked tranquil with her legs crossed in a yoga pose, a blanket cloaked over her shoulders. The girl lifted a hand when Rory appeared, a gentle wave that filled Rory’s heart simultaneously with peace and sorrow.
Camille held something in her lap, and as Rory walked onto the grass and approached the girl, she got a better look at what it was. The Kestner doll was splayed over the girl’s crossed legs. Camille ran her hand over the doll’s knotted hair. Rory squinted in the darkness and saw the jagged fracture down the left side of the doll’s face, the eye socket split open like a chestnut.
“I’m sorry I’ve neglected your case,” Rory said. “I’m sorry I’ve ignored you.”
The girl smiled. It was a radiant smile that put a serene mood over the area where someone had dumped her body. There was no anger or disappointment in her eyes.
“You haven’t ignored me,” Camille said. “You’ve thought of me more than anyone else.”
“I promise to get to your case. I promise to find the person who did this to you.”
“I know you’ll come back to me.”
Rory took a step closer. The Kestner looked as ruined as the day Walter Byrd had given it to her.
“You become close with the people whose deaths you reconstruct. You always have. It’s the way you figure things out that no one else can. And you’ll solve your own riddle as well. All the answers are in front of you. All the things that are troubling you. All the things that make no sense . . .” Camille ran her hand over the doll’s face. “The truth is easy to miss, even when it’s right in front of us.”
Camille shifted the doll in her arms, stared into its eyes.
“You and Greta did such a great job on her.”
At the mention of her name, Rory’s mind ignited with images of Greta as she babbled with dementia each time Rory walked into her room, confused and overwhelmed by Rory’s presence.
“I tried to save you. There was too much blood.”
Rory remembered the fear in Greta’s eyes each time she visited. The distress that lasted a few desperate seconds until Greta snapped back from the tortured memories of her past.
“I wish I could have saved you as easily as Rory and I save the dolls.”
The world began to spin as Rory remembered the mysterious pull that had taken hold of her as a ten-year-old girl, the one that ushered her to the prairie behind the farmhouse. Everything blurred around her as she thought of the roses heaped in a pile on the ground, of their sweet scent that filled her body when she placed them to her nose, of the peace that came to her.
As quickly as the spinning started, the world stopped. Rory found herself alone. Camille Byrd was gone. In her place on the grassy knoll was a bundle of roses and the Kestner doll, restored to perfection.
Greta’s voice echoed in her ears:
“I tried to save you. There was too much blood.”
“There’s too much blood. We have to go to the hospital.”
“He’s coming. You told me. He’ll come for you.”
Then Camille Byrd’s voice:
“The truth is easy to miss, even when it’s right in front of us.”
As Rory stood in the grassy knoll of Grant Park, it all made sense. The connection she felt to Angela Mitchell and all the similarities that linked them, her father’s appeal letters that screamed to Rory an ulterior motive about never wanting Thomas Mitchell out of jail, Greta’s connection to Angela, her career as a midwife, the adoption to Frank and Marla Moore, her father’s stress during the final year of his life as he could no longer stop Thomas Mitchell’s release from jail.
And something else that tugged at her. It was so close to surfacing, but the harder she reached into the far recesses of her mind to retrieve it, the more she stirred in bed. Rory moaned now as she tried to pull herself from sleep. As Rory tried to run, she heard Camille Byrd’s voice. When she turned, the girl was back on the grass, standing with the blanket cloaked over her shoulders. The yellow halogen painted Camille’s shadow on the wall behind her, and the image triggered Rory’s mind. She understood what had been bothering her, and she knew it was Camille who had helped her epiphany.
“Thank you for restoring my doll. It means everything to my father.”
When Rory looked, the Kestner was flawless as it rested in Camille’s arms. The girl waved again and then Rory ran and ran.
CHAPTER 38
Chicago, November 5, 2019
SHE WOKE WITH A JOLT, KICKING HERSELF AWAKE. THE SHEETS WERE tangled around her legs and it took her a moment to free them. Covered in sweat, she felt her heart thundering as she remembered her dream. When she replayed the image of Camille Byrd’s shadow cast on the brick wall, Rory jumped from bed. She stepped into a pair of jeans, pulled on a T-shirt, and sunk her feet into her combat boots. She draped her beanie hat over her head as she crashed through the front door and climbed into her car.
At just past midnight, there was no traffic and she reached the nursing home in fifteen minutes. She sped into the turnabout, where the ambulance and fire truck had been parked the day before, left her car running and the driver’s-side door open as she ran into the building.
Rory had made many midnight trips to the nursing home over the years, and knew the place would be asleep. There was a young man tending the front desk when Rory rattled into the lobby in her combat boots.
“Hi,” the man whispered in a voice meant to display the serenity of the place at such an hour. “Are you here to see a resident?”
“I need to see the visitor log from yesterday.”
“Do you need to sign in?”
“No, I just need to look through the log from yesterday.”
“Are you looking for a specific resident?”
Rory took a breath. She could play this one of two ways. Force the issue by threatening to have Ron Davidson of the CPD down here in a matter of minutes to find the log for her—or play the sympathy card. She chose the latter.
“My aunt passed yesterday. Her dear friend came to see her just before she died, and I’ve forgotten her name. I’m sure she signed in, and I was hoping to recognize her name.”
“Oh.” The young man was immediately defenseless. “Of course.”
He opened a drawer behind the desk and pulled out a thick three-ring binder. He placed it on the counter, spun it so that it was upright for Rory, and opened the cover. Bound neatly into the rings were the year of visitor log sign-in sheets. Yesterday’s was on top. Rory placed her finger on the first line of the page and quickly skimmed down the names until she saw it.
Her fierce mind flashed with images of Thomas Mitchell’s penmanship from reading the letters he had written to her father. The Thief’s writing had been meticulous, all caps, and in perfect rows despite the lineless paper on which it was printed. Rory remembered the unique way in which he wrote his A’s as inverted V’s.
The character had jumped from the page in every word where it was present. The unusual symbol filled her vision now as she remembered the font. The nursing home began to spin, just like in her dream. She remembered Camille Byrd’s image from her dream, when the girl stood and the halogen light painted her shadow on the brick wall. It reminded Rory of the night she stood in the alley behind Angela Mitchell’s house, her legs forming the same inverted V. Rory remembered, too, the eerie sensation that had come over her that night. She had felt it again
yesterday when she signed the visitor log—a premonition she had been unable to place. It had screamed for her attention just before the nurse appeared out of the corner of her eye, hurrying toward her to break the news about Greta. Now, measured and with a gentle push from Camille Byrd, Rory was able to comprehend it. Thomas Mitchell’s penmanship was present on the page in front of her. The same inverted V’s.
The person who had come to see the resident in room 121 had written Greta’s name in perfect block, all-caps letters: MΛRGΛRET SCHREIBER.
CHAPTER 39
Starved Rock, Illinois, November 5, 2019
IT WAS APPROACHING 2:00 A.M. WHEN RORY TOOK THE HIGHWAY EXIT. I-80 had been empty, but for the rare set of isolated headlights, and now she found herself truly alone as she took the sleepy country roads that led toward Starved Rock State Park and the cabin that waited in the woods. She’d driven the route twice before, and this third outing came from memory. She didn’t hesitate at the forks, didn’t contemplate the T’s. She knew the way. The route had burned itself into her memory the way everything else did. The same way all the details of her life were stored and categorized.
Rory wasn’t always aware of the things her mind noticed or picked up on, and could not readily comprehend the enormous volume of material her memory logged. But since her dream, since finding Camille Byrd’s spirit nestled in the grassy knoll in Grant Park, all the cryptic elements of her childhood and the farmhouse—of Aunt Greta and her parents, of her visits to the nursing home and the dolls she restored, of Greta’s seemingly random mutterings, of the mysterious pull that had once drawn her to the back property of the farmhouse as a young child, of the instant attraction she felt toward Angela Mitchell, and of the nearly identical symptoms they shared of social anxiety and obsessive compulsion—all came to her with vivid clarity. She knew what it all meant. She had finally grasped that elusive element of her existence that had been out of reach for so long, and it had taken nothing more than a push from the spirit of a dead girl who waited for her help.
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