by Sara Shepard
They uploaded the image on TinEye, but there were no results. “I’m not surprised,” Madison said. “This photo looks over fifteen years old. We weren’t taking millions of pictures of ourselves and our kids like we do now. Did cell phones even have cameras back then?”
The wind was whipping Seneca’s hair into her face, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Okay, so Sadie Sage had kids. And maybe their names were Julia and Alex. If this photo was taken more than fifteen years ago, those kids would be in their twenties now. Are we thinking maybe they know where Sadie’s hiding?”
“Maybe,” Maddox said, not having considered that. “So how could we find them? They might be able to tell us a lot.”
“It won’t be easy going on first names only,” Seneca grumbled. She sat down on the curb and rubbed her temples. “What does all this mean?”
Everyone kept clicking on their phones as the sun sank over the horizon. Social media sites, chat rooms, news channels—but they didn’t know what to search for, exactly. It wasn’t like Julia and Alex were going to do some tell-all on the Today show as the children of a crazy kidnapper mother. And because their names were fairly common, they couldn’t pin down surefire matches that lived in Catskill or northern Jersey, which Viola was pretty sure was Heather’s home base when she gave piano lessons to Brett.
Stuck, they trudged back onto the street and tried Thomas at the hospital. He was awake, and Seneca filled him in on the details of what they’d discovered. “There’s something you guys haven’t considered,” Thomas said. “Julia and Alex might be twenty-whatever years old now, but they were kids when Brett and Viola were captured. So where were they when all that was happening?”
“Living with their father, maybe?” Madison suggested. “Mom and Dad didn’t get along?”
“That’s possible,” Thomas said. “A lot of kidnappers are non-custodial parents. They feel powerless that the court awarded the other parent their children, so they grab the kids and run.”
Seneca narrowed her eyes. “Yeah, but then why didn’t Sadie just steal her real kids? Why did she take kids that just looked like her real kids?”
“Maybe they had a restraining order?” Madison suggested.
Thomas sniffed. “She wouldn’t have cared about a restraining order. People in her mind-set rarely do.”
Seneca paused next to an overfilled trash can. “Maybe we’re not thinking about this the right way. It just doesn’t make sense that Sadie would take other kids instead of her own. And not just one time, either, but at least twice. And if she called Brett and Viola Alex and Julia because they were her kids’ names—is she calling Damien Alex, too? What does that suggest? Why would someone do that?”
Everyone was quiet. Maddox stared blankly at the stars that were beginning to emerge. Then Madison breathed in. “Maybe something else happened to her kids that makes her feel powerless? Like, not a bitter divorce…but something tragic, maybe?”
Maddox felt a chill. “I was thinking the same thing,” Thomas’s voice crackled. “Say Sadie’s kids were in an accident…or they were killed. Maybe it was something she can’t forgive herself for, or something that was out of her control. When she sees a kid that looks like her own kids, strong emotions are triggered inside her. She snaps. She has to have those kids, whoever they are, to make up for her kids who were taken away. It’s like a sickness. And so she kidnaps the look-alikes. Again and again.”
“And she calls them Alex and Julia,” Seneca said, thinking this through. “And she plays house. Feeds them, teaches them, but never lets them out of her sight. And she punishes them if they step out of line. Try to escape.”
Madison stared at her phone but didn’t seem to know what to google. “Search for something like horrific accidents, children,” Seneca instructed. “Or maybe a double murder? If we get a hit, this could give us Sadie’s real name. Which could be huge.”
“It would have to be before 2002.” Thomas’s voice crackled with phone static. “Because that’s when Brett was taken, and you’d figure the tragedy would kick off the pattern.”
“And Brett was nine, right?” Seneca asked, her eyes on her screen. “Viola was eleven. Damien is also nine. Maybe there’s something significant about those ages. Maybe that’s how old her kids were when it happened.”
More phone searches. The first items to fill Maddox’s Google results were a lot of accidental deaths of tweens from the “choking game,” kids playing with their parents’ guns and mistakenly shooting one another, and a freak accident involving an eleven-year-old and a pit bull. He scrolled and scrolled, not finding anything that matched.
After forty-five minutes, fatigue was starting to set in. Madison rubbed her eyes. Thomas had to get off the phone because a doctor had come in the room. “Guys, maybe this is a dead end,” Maddox said. “Maybe Sadie just really liked the names Julia and Alex. And maybe those kids in the picture are just…nobody.”
Seneca groaned. “But I feel like we’re this close to figuring out her real name.”
They were back at where they’d parked by now, in front of the house where Brett had been trapped for six long years. Suddenly, a light snapped on in the house across the street, and Maddox turned. Two people passed by the front picture window. Did they see Maddox and the others? They probably looked nuts, standing in front of this derelict building, all on their phones. Still, Maddox opened a new tab, wondering what else he could look for. He’d already typed in murdered children, horrific car accidents, beach drownings, shark attacks, and other freak incidents that might drive a mother mad. What else was there?
He looked up again, beyond frustrated. The window across the street was dark again, but the couple had lit a candle, easily visible on the mantel. Maddox watched its hot orange tip flicker and dance. New lights snapped on upstairs, and he saw the couple move through a bedroom. Did they remember that candle was still lit downstairs? He could just imagine his OCD mom watching this play out: She was a nutcase when it came to leaving candles burning unattended. Those always lead to house fires, she said again and again.
Fire. His fingers flew, typing in a new search using some of the same details. “Oh my God,” he whispered once the results came up. Just change a few words, and suddenly a whole new world was revealed.
He showed Seneca the story he’d found. Family members identify nine-year-old boy and eleven-year-old girl as victims of devastating house fire in peaceful ocean town of Lorelei, New Jersey. The story was dated 2001.
“Whoa,” Seneca said in a haunted voice.
The page took a moment to load. Maddox’s eyes scanned the text, his heart speeding up with every word. A single mother, Candace Lord, an eleven-year-old girl named Julia, and a nine-year-old boy, Alex, were on a family vacation when their rental property caught on fire. Candace was out on the deck at the time; her children were sleeping. By the time the fire department arrived, the house had burned almost to the ground; the children didn’t survive. Faulty wiring was suspected.
The story talked about the school the children attended, somewhere in the middle of New Jersey, and that their father, a Richard Quigley—Candace had never changed her name when she married—had passed away from a sudden heart attack just six months before. Candace’s parents, Dawn and William, lived in a town called West Prune, an hour away from the vacation spot. There were a few sentences on funeral services and three pictures with the story. Two were the latest school pictures of Alex and Julia Quigley—and after a quick check of the photo in Seneca’s hand, they were indeed the same kids. The third photo was of a puffy-eyed woman. As Maddox leaned in to look at her closer, the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. There was something about the shape of her eyebrows and her nose that made him suddenly sure.
“Sadie,” he whispered.
“Could this incident have made her snap?” Madison whispered. “And is this why she feels the need to kidnap other children and keep them under lock and key? She couldn’t save her kids, so some twisted part of her brain now t
hinks she can heal if she just keeps kids safe inside.”
“She can’t accept that her kids are gone,” Seneca suggested. “It’s obviously why she picks kids that look like Alex and Julia—she wants to get as close to her old family as she can. It seems like she even wanted to choose kids who had the same interest as hers—Brett and Viola both played piano like Alex and Julia, and so does Damien.”
“It’s why she taught piano lessons and became a math tutor,” Maddox said. “She was trolling for more kids. It’s also why she took students from all over the place—so she could find the perfect victims. The closest matches to Alex and Julia.”
“She has a pattern, just like Brett has a pattern,” Seneca whispered.
Everyone took a moment to let it sink in. An ice cream truck rumbled past, a saccharine, tinkling song leaking out its speakers. Maddox turned back to the group, a terrible feeling washing over him. “Except there’s something we haven’t thought of.”
“What?” Madison blinked hard, her voice edgy with fear.
“If she’s trying to create her perfect family, she chooses a replacement Alex and a Julia. Brett was Alex. Viola was Julia. But in her latest kidnapping, we only have an Alex.”
Seneca looked sick. “You’re right.”
Madison nodded, which was fine—Maddox wasn’t even sure he wanted to say the words out loud. It might not just be a boy trapped in this deranged woman’s lair. There might be a kidnapped girl, too.
BRETT STARED OUT the window into the darkening night. He could hear as cars passed and voices called. Most of the voices he recognized. He knew every inch of this street. Every flower bed, every bush. He knew every neighbor—who was friendly, who wasn’t, who was nosy, and who didn’t give a shit. He knew, too, when new people so much as stepped onto the street. It was like the street was part of him, a piece of his soul.
The phone rang, and he checked the screen. Seneca again. Wasn’t she an A-plus student!
“Yes?” he drawled. He peeked again at her GPS marker on his screen. His stomach turned a little; it was obvious where she was. But he couldn’t let that get to him. So she was finding it all out, turning over every stone. This was part of the process. He had to be cool with it.
Except, well, he wasn’t.
“Elizabeth Ivy’s real name was Candace Lord.” Seneca’s words came out in a rush. “She had two children who were eleven and nine, and they died in a brutal house fire. She began kidnapping kids who looked similar.”
Brett nodded. “Yes. That’s right.”
There was a pause. “What do you mean that’s right?”
“I already knew that.”
He could just picture Seneca’s mouth falling open. “Then why didn’t you tell us?”
“I wanted to give you a day to see if you could figure it out by yourself. And you did, so bravo.”
“But we wasted a day! We could have been much farther ahead by now!”
The walls in this place were sloppily plastered, with big bumps here and there and huge, mountainous swirls. Brett ran his fingers along the ridges hypnotically. It wasn’t exactly like he was trying to bog them down with busywork. Seneca was welcome to think it was game playing, but this was strategy. He knew how leads worked. If he spoon-fed them everything he knew, they wouldn’t look for new clues or come to their own conclusions. They’d just be following his lead, and possibly get stuck where he did. If they wasted a day, so be it. It was worth the fresh look. The endgame was the woman who took him, and he’d do anything to find her.
And there was the issue of Aerin, too. Brett inhaled; he could smell the soap she’d used to shower, even from the hall. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to give her up. Because once he did, he’d never see her again.
“Did Elizabeth tell you her children died?” Maddox jumped in.
Brett moved away from the window now and began pacing down the hall. The carpet was worn from all the circles he’d done. “Never explicitly, no. But I figured it out. And after I escaped, I found out her real name and what happened to them. I even visited her parents to try and figure it all out.”
“What did they say?” Madison asked.
Brett slid down the wall outside Aerin’s room and thought of walking up to the Lords’ house all those years ago. It had been a hot, dusty day. He’d already begun to sweat profusely on the doorstep, and he’d felt sick to his stomach.
“I knocked on their door. They lived in this huge house. Didn’t tell them who I was or anything. I’m sure they wouldn’t have believed me. People had heard of a girl being kidnapped, but it was by a woman named Elizabeth Ivy, not their daughter. So I said I was selling magazine subscriptions. I had a booklet, forms for them to fill out.”
“What were they like?” Thomas asked.
When Brett closed his eyes, he could still picture the Lords’ craggy faces, the mother’s unattractive gray hair, the father’s potbelly. The house smelled like potpourri. A cat wound around his legs, leaving tiny, sticky hairs. He’d wanted to throw that cat across the room, make it yowl. He’d wanted to knock down all the pictures of Candace as a young girl that sat on the grand piano, smash the glass. He’d wanted to jump on the coffee table and tell those people exactly who their daughter was…but he’d been weak then. The fury was still curled up inside him, sleeping; he didn’t know how to use it yet. So he’d just sat on the couch, drinking the coffee they offered, tongue-tied with his fake magazine booklet on his lap.
“They invited me in,” he said. “I gave my spiel. Tried to make conversation. Asked if they had any pets, and then any kids. They mentioned a daughter.” His throat felt prickly as he remembered the hatred he’d felt when they’d said the word daughter so lovingly. “I asked where she was. But they clammed up. Wouldn’t tell me a damn thing.” Okay, so actually he’d been the one to clam up. He’d walked into that house and it was like any house, with furniture and rugs and an air freshener and coffee brewing in the kitchen. When he sat on the couch, he’d noticed a small watercolor of an owl hanging on one of the walls, and he’d done a double take. The same picture had hung on the wall at his house, the one Candace had stolen him from. It seemed unbelievable that his life could have intersected with hers in any way, but there it was, that stupid owl on a branch, its big eyes unblinking. And then he’d gotten to thinking about that owl painting and the rest of his parents’ belongings: their couches, their blankets, their books, the things that made it a home. Who knew what had happened to all of it. He hadn’t even checked. He’d suddenly gotten so choked up, and his heart started beating too fast.
But he didn’t need to tell them that. If they didn’t understand that he wasn’t clearheaded when it came to hunting down his own kidnapper, he wasn’t going to spell it out.
“Do you think they know what she’s up to?” Seneca asked incredulously.
“I got the sense that they just hadn’t seen her in a long time. That’s it.”
“They didn’t mention the kids and the fire?”
Brett sniffed. We didn’t even get that far. “They kicked me out pretty quickly. The father was pissed. Said they didn’t have any money for what I was selling—which was bullshit, because their house was pretty dope. And that was it. I couldn’t find anything else about her. I asked about her around where the parents lived, but no one knew a thing.” He stood, his legs feeling stiff, his nerves jangling. “So there you are. Now we’re all on the same page. Though I’m not going to say a word about how you involved Viola in this, which you should consider a gift. You disobeyed me.”
Seneca sucked in a breath. “How did you know we talked to Viola?”
Brett ignored her. “Do it again, and I won’t be so friendly. Got it?”
And with that, he stabbed at the END button and slid the phone languidly across the carpet, sending it bumping softly against the far wall.
He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. Images of the cramped, dark house where he’d been imprisoned danced into his mind. He could practically feel the place’s
shadow looming over him, and now that Viola had been dragged into the fold, he was bombarded with memories of her, too—soft, kind, but as scared as he was. And that shed—he could smell that shed’s rot, feel those invisible bugs crawling over him, hear his own voice as it sobbed quietly, relentlessly. He’d never been sure she was going to let him out. Every time she stuck him in there, he was always half-afraid she’d leave him there to die.
So Elizabeth had lost kids of her own in a fire and it had unleashed a poison inside her. It didn’t mean she had to transfer that poison to other people. It didn’t mean she had to leak it into him.
Brett sometimes wondered who he might be if he hadn’t gone with Elizabeth that day. If only there had been a tear in the fabric of the space-time continuum; if only he’d stayed at school a little longer and hung out on the playground with his friends. She wouldn’t have been able to get to him, wouldn’t have told him her lies.
There would have been video games. Christmas mornings. Amusement parks, school plays, first girlfriends. There wouldn’t have been shouting and cold, dark nights in a shed. He wouldn’t have been mutated and ruined. He probably would have graduated high school, gone to college. Maybe Alternate Jackson had a job by now, a girlfriend, a normal life.
It was as unfathomable as living on Saturn. As breathing in helium instead of air.
A small, dirty moan escaped from his lips. It was from a shameful part of him, a regretful part, maybe the part that still existed from before all this, the part that sometimes slithered its way out of the cracks and looked at him, horrified, at what he’d become. He stared at his hands, suddenly not recognizing them. Oh my God, a voice rang out in his head. Oh my God, who am I?
“Brett?”
Aerin was calling out from the other side of her locked door. Slowly, he twisted the knob. Dim gray light spilled from inside the room; it was only then that he realized he’d been sitting in absolute darkness, not unlike the deep black nothingness he’d wallowed in when Elizabeth had trapped him in the shed. Aerin sat cross-legged on her bed, staring at him with her big, beautiful blue eyes with such kindness it almost hurt.