Ella lifted the rack of files from the trunk, set the wire file holder on the braided rug, let the trunk lid thud close. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she stared at what was in the first manila folder she’d opened. The one marked BEERMAN.
A footprint. A photocopy, embossed with a notary seal. She ran her fingers over the raised letters. Woodmere Beach Hospital. The birthdate was—Ella quickly calculated—twenty-eight years ago. And it was marked BABY GIRL BEERMAN.
A tiny infant footprint, the incontrovertible evidence of identity. This was either Tucker Cameron’s footprint, or it wasn’t. Every folder she’d taken from Lillian’s desk Sunday night had been missing that one critical piece of paper. Ella had put those folders safely away, hiding them in her apartment.
Had Lillian taken the footprints out on purpose? Or had someone else removed the footprints—and Lillian found out? Found them?
Was Lillian saving the footprints that proved birth parents had been sent the wrong children? Why?
The rack also held files labeled HOFFNER. LAMONICA. DACOSTO. The very families she’d contacted.
And a dozen more. Were they all the wrong children?
What was that noise? Ella lifted her head. Scanned the room. Sniffed again.
Now she could see it. She wasn’t imagining it. That’s what she’d smelled. Not death. But smoke. Smoke. And now it was seeping into the windowless room. Wisps of gray curled through each metal vent lining one side of the room. And on the other side. Every one. No question. It stung her eyes. Filled her nose. Smoke.
Fire.
*
“Ma’am?” the dispatcher’s voice buzzed into Jane’s ear. “Are you away from the house? We need you to move away. Right now. Let us take care of this, ma’am. There are units en route. Please confirm you are away from the building.”
Jane stood in the doorway. She was brave, sometimes, but going into a burning building was—well, she’d done enough news stories to know what could happen. Sure there were sometimes those “hero” sound bites after. But not always.
The front door stood open now, no smoke in the entryway. Curvy wooden table under a framed mirror, circular rug. No smoke. Jane saw lights on in the living room and the back of the house. No smoke inside. Not that she could see. Maybe the fire was a little one, just in the basement. Maybe she should—
“Ella!”
“Ma’am?” The dispatcher’s voice. “I’m ordering you to—”
“Ella!” She screamed now. Ella’s car was still empty, that woman was somewhere, and if not inside this house, where? This had been Ella’s destination, she’d made that clear, and Jane had told her to wait. But Ella had obviously ignored her.
Damn it, damn it, damn it.
She took a step inside.
67
“Jane!” Jake raced up the front walk, jacket flapping, his cruiser’s wig-wags bluing the snowflakes and siren wailing. Jane’s car sat across the street, behind a blue Accord. He’d instantly seen both were unoccupied.
What the hell was Jane doing here?
He saw the open doorway. Her unmistakable silhouette in the dim light from the home’s interior. Smoke puffed from an obviously broken basement window. The street seemed deserted, except for a light-colored van up the block. Half his brain noticed the van pull away.
“Jane! Stop!”
He reached the door, ran inside, grabbed her by the shoulder, yanked her toward him.
Was she crying? Her hair was coated with a melting layer of sleet, drops of water lining her face. She wore only one glove.
“Jane, what the hell are you doing?” He pulled her out the front door, feeling her stumble and shake him off, then stop resisting. “There’s a god damn fire.”
“I think there’s someone in there!” She pointed toward the house as he pulled her down the path to the sidewalk. “Ella Gavin. From the Brannigan. She told me she needed to get something of Lillian Finch’s. That Lillian had given her keys. I told her not to, but—”
Jane gulped, hands on knees, catching her breath. “So I had to—”
“You were going in?” Jake grabbed his radio, raising his voice over the siren. “Dispatch, this is Brogan at twenty-seven Margolin. Reporting an emergency. Confirm smoke is showing from basement window. Reports of a person or persons who may be trapped inside. Please advise of your ETA.”
He pulled Jane behind his cruiser, clutching her hand, snow swirling around them. “You’re completely crazy. Listen. Get across the street. Behind your car. Stay there. Stay down. Hear me?”
He turned her to face him, needing to let her know this was serious. Dangerous. She was crazy, his Janey, thinking she could go into a burning house.
He was going to kill her.
But first he had to go in. Try to save whoever was in there. “Do not go near that place. Engines are on the way, the fire isn’t even—”
There was a sound. A whoosh. A flash.
*
Jane ducked into Jake’s shoulder, shielding her eyes. Ella was inside. Jane knew she was, had to be, and it seemed she’d been inside way too long, and the fire department hadn’t even arrived, and someone needed to—
“Down!” Jake pulled her close, held her hard, his breath warm against her ear. Smoke plumed from the house. “Get down!” She’d never heard his voice like this. He clicked his radio.
“Dispatch? You copy?”
Jake yanked her, so hard her knees buckled and she grabbed his car door handle to stay standing. He was trying to protect her, she understood, but Ella was in there. Inside. Someone had to save her. Someone had to help.
“Jake! We have to—”
“I know, Janey. Dispatch, this is Brogan. Requesting all available fire and rescue units.” To Jane. “I’m going in. But it’s—All units. You copy?”
Orange flames licked from the basement window, and then another sound, another whoosh, and another window exploded with black smoke, flames following the darkness out of the shattered glass.
*
“Go, go, go!” Keefer yelled, one fist pumping the air as Kellianne’s head slammed into the seatback. Kevin must have floored it. The van lurched forward, sliding on the slick street, tires slipping in the slush, Kev ignoring the stop sign again and hitting the gas, careening onto Mass Ave.
Looking out the back window as Kev hit full speed ahead, Kellianne had seen the fire. So that’s what they were doing.
“You set—”
“The house was empty, right? But full of our stuff. Only Hennessey knew we were there, right, and not like he’s gonna rat us out. Get him in as much trouble as us. So, adiós, house. We started in the basement. One match to that disinfectant stuff alone’s enough to—hey—whoa, watch it, bro! That’s a goddamn bus!”
Kev yanked the wheel and slammed on brakes, as a T bus turned a corner right into them. The van lurched to the right, up the curb onto the sidewalk. Kellianne clutched the side strap with one hand, her tote bag to her chest with the other, closed her eyes, felt the van bump back on the street. She risked opening her eyes, but couldn’t let go of the strap. They were fine. Driving again. Holy shit.
To cover up what they did when that old guy died, her stupid brothers had set the whole freaking house on fire.
The tote bag of ’bilia seemed to get heavier on her lap.
No one would connect them to that house, right? There’d been no contract, no formal business deal except with the Hennessey cop, and Kev was right, he sure wasn’t gonna rat. Their cleaning supplies would burn up in the fire.
She guessed that was the whole point.
The streets of Boston whizzed by, snow splatting on the windshield. Kevin finally keeping to the speed limit. The fire was way behind them, out of their lives. Who’d ever blame them for it?
She nodded, grudgingly giving her brothers some props.
This could work.
68
Plumes of white steam hissed from the remains of 27 Margolin Street. Snaking canvas fire hoses connected hydrants up the sidewalk and
across the street. Neighbors clustered on the sidewalk, faces bundled against the cold, shielding their eyes from the glaring daylight-bright spots the firefighters switched on to help them in the darkness.
Jane could no longer feel her feet, but could not bear to wait in the car. She stood with the others, behind the firefighter lines, watching, mesmerized, as the water froze almost as quickly as it hit what was left of the roof and puffed white into the dark night. The snow had stopped, but the temperature had plummeted, Jane could tell by her fingers and tingling face. Firefighters, some with icicles on their helmets, stood red-faced and determined, rooted, aiming their powerful hoses.
“Losing battle,” Jane heard one guy mutter. “The place went up like a—”
“Miss Ryland? Jane?” The incident commander touched her coat sleeve. Jane recognized Sergeant Monahan from her general assignment reporter days. Her heart clenched. This was going to be about Ella. It could not be good. And it was her fault. Jane’s own fault.
She’d watched, tears streaming down her face, as a canvas-clad firefighter emerged from the still-black smoke, emerged from where the front door used to be, carrying a blanket-draped—well, a person. Jane saw feet poking from under the edge of whatever covered it. Had to be Ella. Ella’s body. Motionless. The firefighter had not been running. Might Jane have been able to save her?
Jane lunged forward, toward the figures silhouetted in the flames, but Jake had held her back, one hand wrapped around her arm, his body pressed against her back. Stronger than she was.
“Honey, Janey, stop. There’s nothing you can do. Nothing you could have done. Just—let’s see what happened.”
“But I could have … should have…”
“No. You shouldn’t have,” Jake said. “Trying to help is one thing. Being an idiot is another.”
“But what if—”
“There’s no ‘what if,’” Jake told her. “There’s what is. And that we don’t know yet.”
The commander was saying something. She had to focus.
“Ma’am? Jane?”
Jane turned. The air still reeked of fire and smoke, the choking darkness blanketing the night. Jane could taste it, and could smell nothing else.
“She’s asking for you,” the sergeant said. “She’s getting oxygen, she shouldn’t remove the mask. We’re transporting her any second. But she was trying to tell us something, pretty upset, so we gave her paper. She wrote ‘find Jane Ryland.’ And here you are.”
Monahan touched his mustache with the tip of a finger. “Is there something you’d like to tell us? You have ID on her? Could she have set this fire? This one’s clearly suspicious. Arson’s on the way.”
“Huh?” Jane tried to sort this out. Of course the firefighters couldn’t know who Ella was. How could they? “Her name is Ella Gavin. She works at—She’s a friend of the person who—She’s asking for me? I’m sure she couldn’t have—wouldn’t have—She’ll be okay?”
“She’d covered herself with a thick tablecloth of some kind,” Monahan told her. The glare from the emergency lights made elongated shadows on the snow and slickening ice as Jane and Monahan picked their way toward the ambulance, stepping over an obstacle course of engorged canvas hoses.
“She was trying to carry a bunch of papers, something like that, but O’Toole says they dropped as he carried her out.” He gestured at the smoky destruction. “Hope they weren’t important.”
*
“Hello, Detective Brogan, I remember you. Do you remember me?”
Jake felt a tug on his sleeve as he watched Jane follow Monahan toward Ella Gavin. He knew how Jane felt. He, too, had stood there, helpless and surprised, as freaking Hennessey shot Curtis Ricker. Barely a moment had gone by since the shooting when he hadn’t wondered—Might I have prevented it? Was there something I could have done? To hear Jane express the same wish and know she felt exactly the same remorse made him care about her even more. If that was possible. Such a genuinely good—
“Detective?” The tug grew more insistent. “Remember?”
He turned. In the bright circle of the street light, wearing a white crocheted hat and too much rouge, stood—Dorothy. Debbie. “Dolly,” he said. “Dolly … Richards.”
“Yes, exactly, Detective Brogan.” Dolly poked his arm with a finger. “I told you something was going on here, didn’t I? Now don’t you agree? Don’t you suspect it might be those people in the van?”
“People in the van?” Jake’s peripheral memory dragged up the image of a gray van driving away from the fire when he’d been focused on yanking Jane out of the burning house. He turned to Mrs. Richards with narrowed eyes. “What van, ma’am?”
*
“Ella?” Jane’s whisper was almost more to herself than to the blanketed form on the gurney. Ella’s face was covered with a plastic oxygen mask, her body silvered with a space-blanket throw. Her eyes were closed. Was she—?
“Ma’am?” The EMT beside the gurney, brush-cut and zipped into a parka yellow-stenciled DONALD CANNON, stepped between them. “We’re transporting her now. Please contact Mass General for more information. She’s on oh-two, she cannot take off that mask to talk to you.”
On oxygen. Ella was breathing. Jane looked at Monahan, pleading for intervention. “Will she be okay?” Tell me she’ll be okay.
“Don, this is Jane Ryland.” Monahan stepped up, showed the EMT the handwritten paper. “The person your patient was asking for.”
Cannon frowned, shook his head. “Negative. She cannot talk. Let her see you’re here, Miss Ryland. Then we’re going.”
Jane took one step toward the gurney, fearing what was under that blanket, fearing the future, knowing she might have made a difference, and didn’t. Didn’t.
A movement under the blanket, and Ella’s right hand came out, gestured Jane toward her.
“Go ahead,” Cannon said. “Thirty seconds.”
Ella made a motion like writing.
Cannon handed Ella a mechanical pencil, then pulled a tiny pad from a pocket in his coveralls and held it in front of her, not touching the blanket. The three of them watched, Jane holding her breath, as Ella scrawled something, then something else.
“Pocket?” Jane leaned in to the paper. “Cat?”
The pencil moved again. “Feed?” Jane read.
“There’s something in your pocket, and you want me to feed your cat?” Jane struggled to keep herself from crying and laughing at the same time. “Are your keys in your pocket? Blink twice for yes.”
Ella did. Then pantomimed write again.
“I’m sorry,” the EMT said. “No more. The sooner we get her out of here, the sooner she’ll recover. Say your good-byes.”
The EMT had said “recover.” That was a good sign.
“Cannon, let’s do this,” Monahan said. “Get her keys. And whatever. Quickly.”
“Yessir.” Using two fingers, the EMT lifted the silver blanket, inch by inch. Then turned to Jane, holding a keychain in one hand. A folded piece of paper in the other.
“Is this what you want me to have?” Jane leaned in, close as she could.
Ella’s eyes widened, blinked twice, then closed.
*
“What van?” The woman shot Jake a withering look, right out of grade-school detention. “The van I told you about before. They’ve been here a couple times now. Looked to me like some kind of cleanup crew, you know? Carrying in buckets and mops, carrying out big green trash bags of—whatever. It reminded me of that movie, where the girls come and clean up after murders and things? I thought that’s who these people were. That’s why they had those rolls of yellow tape. But they wouldn’t come after dark, would they, Detective?”
Afterwards? Was here? He’d keyed in on them outside the funeral, but had been crazed with the Ricker thing since then. Afterwards was the crime scene cleanup crew who’d interrupted Kat McMahon’s examination of Brianna Tillson.
They’d been called to Callaberry Street. That must have been okayed by landlord L
eonard Perl. And they’d been here. Who okayed that? This was Finch’s house. She owned it, not Perl. Jake had checked with Alvarez in Records. Finch lived alone.
So. Brianna Tillson—murdered. Lillian Finch’s death—ruled a homicide. Niall Brannigan’s death outside Finch’s house—suspicious. The glue that held all three together was Afterwards. And, possibly, the elusive Leonard Perl.
“Did you see any of the people from the van, Mrs. Richards?”
“Dolly, I told you. There were two at least, maybe three. I can’t be sure.” She gestured toward the house with her mitten. “You think the fire is out? Who was the body that firefighter was carrying? How do you think the fire started? The van people could have done it.”
Mrs. Richards paused her monologue and nodded, apparently approving of her own detective skills. “They sure could’ve.”
Jake had to agree. They sure could’ve.
He reached for his cell, ready to alert DeLuca to accompany him on a come-to-Jesus visit to the now-unsuspecting folks at Afterwards. Folks who would not be so happy when he interrogated them about their role in the death of Niall Brannigan. And their certain knowledge of the whereabouts of Leonard Perl.
He hit DeLuca on speed dial. Then Jake hit “end call.” Shit. How many gray vans were there in Boston? No way to prove whose van had been on Margolin Street. Any evidence of their “cleanup” was a smoking mass of embers and debris. Some defense attorney would rip them to shreds.
“Ma’am?” Maybe she could ID one of them. Something. Anything.
“Look at that Jane Ryland,” Mrs. Richards was saying. “So pretty. I’d recognize her anywhere. What’s she doing here, a story for TV? That’s her little black car, must be.”
“Yes it’s…” Jake watched Mrs. Richards take out a little pink spiral notebook, a ballpoint pen dangling from the spiral.
She clicked open the pen and began to write. “Is that a three or an eight, Detective? My eyes aren’t what they used to be.”
“A three or an—on Jane’s license plate?” Jake was confused. “Why would you be writing that down?”
“Like I told you the other day.” Mrs. Richard puffed out an exasperated breath. “I always take license plates. Always. Even yours. It started when some neighbors were bringing in all kinds of unsavory types. Then it got to be kind of a habit. Tell you a secret, I use the numbers to play the lottery.” She smiled up at him. “Silly, I know. But very lucky.”
The Wrong Girl (Jane Ryland) Page 30