The Amateurs: Last Seen

by Sara Shepard

  “Are there any places he likes to return to? Does he own another house somewhere?” Seneca asked.

  “We need to find our friend,” Madison urged. “We’re afraid he’s going to hurt her.”

  Viola’s eyes darted. “I—I can’t think of anywhere. He was always moving around. I can’t think of anywhere he stayed for more than a few months—except that condo in Avignon.”

  “There’s no way he’s going back there,” Maddox muttered.

  Seneca frowned. “How did he afford that condo, anyway? Did you give him the money?”

  “Nope. But Jackson always had nice cars, nice stuff. It’s not from his parents’ inheritance, or even anything he could have found in their house—he was always telling me they didn’t have much. He said he had a good job, something in tech, something that he was able to do from home.” She bit her lip and looked around nervously. “Jackson was really smart. Elizabeth always used to praise him when we did school stuff. But something told me he was lying. Like maybe …” She stared down at the floor. “Maybe he was getting the money illegally.”

  Maddox thought of the sweet BMW Brett had shown up with the first time they’d met at the CNC meet-up in Jersey. Brett had also stayed at the nicest hotel in Dexby and threw a kick-ass party at the Ritz in New York City. Never once had he mentioned a job—in fact, when they’d first met him, he said he was the grandson of Vera Grady, the famous fashion designer, and suggested she’d left him a lot of cash when she died. Which obviously wasn’t true.

  “And what about your kidnapper?” Madison asked. “The cops never had any leads on where she went after you guys escaped?”

  Viola shook her head. “They couldn’t find her. They looked everywhere. Asked everyone who lived in that town. A lot of people knew her—and they were stunned.”

  Seneca squinted. “And no one else said they remembered Brett kidnapped with you? No other neighbors who met Elizabeth?”

  Viola shook her head. “We never went out. People never saw us. She kept the windows pulled tightly closed. Jackson got out once—he banged on someone’s door down the street, begged her to take him in, but the family brought him back to the house, and that was that. I’m pretty sure it was a tourist. The police mostly just talked to locals.” Then her Apple Watch beeped, and she peered at it. “Oh. I need to get going. My dog’s stuck in his crate at home.”

  “Hold on,” Seneca cried. “Just a few more questions. Where was Elizabeth holding you? Do you remember the house?”

  “The Jersey Shore. Not really far from the city, in a town called Halcyon.”

  “Do you know the street address?”

  “I only know it by sight. It was near the ocean. Nothing special, really. Just a house.”

  Seneca licked her lips. “I know this is a lot to ask, but could you take us there?”

  Viola’s eyes grew large. “I don’t think—”

  “Please,” Maddox interrupted. “That house might give us a clue about where she’s hiding Damien.”

  Viola kept shaking her head. “But this happened years ago. And the police searched everything that was there. It’s not like she left anything behind.”

  “You never know,” Madison pointed out.

  Just outside the gift shop, a cop walking an enormous, drug-sniffing German shepherd passed by. Maddox could feel the rumble of a train under his feet.

  Viola looked tormented. “My husband’s expecting me at home. Sunday is his only day off.”

  Seneca took her hand. “Look. There’s a child being put through hell right now, just like you were. Our friend is in that situation, too. So if you help us, you’ll save two people—and put your kidnapper behind bars. Jackson needs help. He’s sick. We have to stop him before he hurts someone else. We only have a few more days to figure all this out. And if we don’t, he’ll kill Aerin.”

  Viola’s big brown eyes blinked and blinked. The pale green light from a lotto machine on the counter flashed across her face. Maddox hated what they were asking her to do, but he could also tell that she was a good person. How could she not help?

  Viola lowered her head so that the group could see her jagged part. Her shoulders heaved. “I guess I could have a neighbor look in on my dog. Let’s go before I change my mind.”

  NINETEEN

  EVERYONE PILED INTO the Jeep. Viola pulled her car out of a garage near Grand Central and drove separately, though she remained in sight ahead of them so they wouldn’t get separated.

  The drive was frustrating. Traffic in New York was never good, and it took forever to get through the tunnel. The sun was sinking lower in the sky, indicating that Tuesday was slipping away. They only had Monday left. Twenty-four little hours.

  Seneca wished Viola was in the car with them; she wanted to grill her for details—dates, times, places she and Brett had gotten together five years before, cross-referencing them with Helena’s and her mom’s deaths. But maybe it was better to give her some space. They were lucky Viola had even agreed to bring them to the place she’d been imprisoned.

  “Sadie Sage, Elizabeth Ivy, Heather Peony,” Madison kept murmuring. “It sounds like a rhyme. What do those names mean?” She tapped Google on her phone and did a search. Seneca peered over her shoulder as the results came up. The first results were for baby names. Sadie Sage was a clothing brand, and there was an Elizabeth Ivy who took photos of newborns and weddings, but there was no clear link between the three of them.

  They took an exit for Halcyon and wove through quaint, all-American streets, which glimmered in the setting sun. A sign pointed toward a boardwalk; another showed the way to a lighthouse. A brass band was playing in a gazebo in a little square. Seneca felt a tug inside her. This place seemed far too pleasant to be a site for all the darkness Viola and Brett endured here.

  Viola’s Toyota turned on a street called Philadelphia, and Maddox did the same. Viola slowed once passing through a second stop sign; Seneca wondered if they were getting close. Suddenly, Viola stopped short, her brake lights flashing. Maddox slammed the brakes, too. Seneca craned her neck out the window. Most of the houses on the street were lovely, with well-manicured, grassy lawns, cheerful awnings, and spotless front porches. There was a pretty white one on the corner with a porch swing and a widow’s walk. There was a quaint blue one down the street with a pinwheel in the yard. Only a small, spare house wedged between two large brick wonders, practically forgotten, looked different than the rest. Its siding was painted a faded red. The awnings on the top window were rotting away. The only sign of life was a large, well-preserved set of wind chimes hanging from the eaves over the front porch; they clanged together noisily in a gust of wind. There was a big tree in the front yard that had a perfect square burned into the bark. Seneca stared at it a moment, something flickering in her mind.

  But then she turned to Viola, who stood at the curb with her hands in her pockets, staring at the place with a blank expression. She pointed to a bulldozer and front loader parked in an empty lot several doors down. “Those trucks should knock this down next.”

  Seneca looked up and down the wide avenue. Two blocks away, she could see a barrier blocking vehicles from entering the beach; a sun-dappled ocean loomed beyond. There was a strange energy about the place, something familiar to the cracks in the sidewalk, the dancing light off the roofs.

  “Can we go inside?” Madison asked Viola.

  Viola shrugged. “We came all the way here. But if I can’t handle it, I’m leaving, okay?”

  Seneca walked up the front steps. The porch groaned under her weight. When she tried the doorknob, it turned easily. Inside, the walls were scrawled with graffiti and the floor littered with trash. Seneca recoiled at the sour smell and covered her nose. It seemed like this was where kids came to party.

  Viola stared at the two front rooms, dim in the evening light. She pointed at a spot in the kitchen. “That’s where the table was. We’d do ‘school’ there.” Then she pointed at an empty room that probably once held a couch and chairs. “
We weren’t allowed in there. It used to have a door. Actually, I never saw most of these rooms. She only let us in the kitchen, the bathroom, and a bedroom.” Her expression changed when she peered down a set of stairs that led to a dark, moldy-smelling basement, though when Seneca checked it out, it was totally bare save for some beer bottles and cigarette butts. “That’s where she locked me when she went to kidnap Jackson.”

  “Really?” Seneca asked. “Jackson told us she locked him in the shed.”

  Viola looked away. “Yes, that was her special place for him.” She said it in such a dark voice that Seneca felt a shiver.

  Seneca, Maddox, and Madison looked inside drawers in the kitchen and medicine cabinets in the bathroom. They peered under sinks and lifted the lid of the washing machine. They felt their way up the stairs to find three empty rooms; the closets bore no secret messages, the marks in the wood floors told no tales.

  Viola shifted from foot to foot. “It’s weird to see this place with so much light. She had every shade drawn at all times. She never wanted anybody to see us or for us to see anybody.”

  Seneca stared at the bannister. It was eerie to think that Brett’s hands had touched it, too. She’d hoped something of Brett would have lingered here—a smell, a change in the air temperature, even just a feeling. But this was a dingy, trashed house, nothing else.

  She found Viola in the kitchen again, peering into the backyard. “It’s gone,” she chanted, as though in a trance.

  “What’s gone?” Madison asked, pausing while inspecting an empty pantry.

  “The shed. See that little square of grass? That’s where it was.”

  Seneca squinted, but all she saw was a patch of mostly dead grass. It was hard to believe something so horrible had happened in such a mundane-looking space.

  Viola turned to her. “There’s nothing in here, is there? Nothing you can use?”

  Seneca shook her head. “Not really. I’m sorry for dragging you here.”

  Viola ran her finger along the kitchen countertop. It brought up a layer of dust. “I have dreams about this place almost every night. Terrible dreams that I’m back and I’ll never be able to escape. But seeing the place again … it kind of takes the terror out of it. It’s just a house. It’s still standing. And I’m still standing.”

  “You’re very brave.”

  Viola sniffed. “Some days, anyway.”

  Seneca picked at a loose strip of laminate on one of the drawers, a question forming in her mind. “Can you tell me anything else about Jackson?”

  Viola placed her palms flat on the counter. “He crawled into my bed at night, hugged me close. Eventually, Elizabeth figured out that we relied on each other too much, and she separated us by a curtain. She tried to tell me things that would make me hate him—like that she caught him looking at me while I took a shower, and how he hated that I was his pretend sister—but I didn’t believe her. I knew she was just trying to drive a wedge between us.”

  The mental image of that filled Seneca with a bottomless sadness. “Why do you think you turned out okay and he didn’t?”

  Viola shrugged. “Maybe because I had a family to go back to.”

  After Maddox and Madison had thoroughly scoured the house, they slipped out the front door and stepped down the creaky porch. As Seneca was inspecting a crack in a basement window, she heard footsteps behind her.

  “I’m not going to say that being here in the very place where Brett was held prisoner makes me feel for the guy, even though I sort of do,” Maddox said. “But I understand your point. We shouldn’t feel for him.”

  Seneca sighed. “Maybe I was wrong.” She told him what Viola had just said about Brett—how much he relied on Viola while they were trapped in the house, how he might have taken a turn for the worse because he had no family to go back to. “It’s too bad he didn’t live with Viola and her parents after they were released. It might have helped him to have people who cared about him around.”

  “Totally,” Maddox said softly. “Family is everything.” He glanced meaningfully toward Madison, who was lifting up the mailbox’s small brass lid. Of course there was nothing inside.

  The only sounds were the melodic clangs from the wind chimes. They seemed to strike a chord in Seneca’s mind, an old, nostalgic feeling of summer. She heard voices and tensed, but it was just two little kids in that vacant lot with the big trucks. The kids were using the huge dirt pile as a slide.

  Suddenly, she remembered something. She reached into her messenger bag and pulled out the limp, folded photograph she’d found in Sadie Sage’s—or Elizabeth Ivy’s, or Heather Peony’s—crawl space in Catskill.

  “Viola?” she called out. Viola was unlocking her car at the curb. Seneca walked toward her. “Here. Take this.”

  Viola opened the door to her car so that the interior light could illuminate the photograph. After a moment of staring at it, she made a face. “Who are these people?”

  “I-isn’t it you? And Jackson? We found it among Elizabeth’s things when we searched her place in New York.”

  Viola gave the photo back. “This isn’t me. It isn’t him, either.”

  As Seneca looked closer, she realized that Viola was right. This girl had green eyes, and Viola’s were brown. She had a mole on her chin, and Viola didn’t.

  Viola studied the photo, then looked away. “I have to go,” she said quietly. “I’ve spent too much time here already. Will you keep me posted, though?” Her face was so full of concern. “If you find Jackson? And about your friend?”

  “Of course,” Seneca said.

  The good-byes were awkward; Seneca wasn’t sure whether to hug her or shake hands, so she settled on a heartfelt wave. As Viola was getting into the car, she stuck her head out the window. Her eyes darted back and forth like she was considering saying something. Finally, she blurted, “She didn’t call me Viola, by the way. She called me Julia.”

  “Julia?” Seneca repeated. “Why?”

  Viola shrugged. “She said she liked the name. She called Jackson Alex.” With a sad smile, she pulled away.

  Everyone stared at one another. “Why would she call them by other names?” Seneca whispered.

  Maddox looked baffled. “Because she was crazy?”

  Another few beats passed. The wind ruffled the edges of Seneca’s hair. Something inside the house they’d just toured moaned, and Madison grimaced. “Maybe it’s just me, but can we move away from this house?” Madison suggested after she was gone. “Maybe walk to the beach? This place is giving me the creeps.”

  “Sure,” Seneca said absently, and they turned in that direction. There was a small path and wooden bridge leading over the dunes, and soon enough they were on the sand. The beach was more crowded than Seneca would have expected: A bunch of people were taking in the last dregs of the sunset, a dogged man was still swiping with his metal detector, and a bunch of teenagers were chasing each other near the shore. She inhaled the sharp, salty smell and let her body relax. There was something about even being at the beach that calmed her just a little, even with all of the questions swirling in her brain.

  She puzzled over what Viola had just said, and then, in the dying light, she stared hard at the picture Viola hadn’t wanted. Two kids, a boy and a girl, stood on a sidewalk. They were smiling. Happy. That should have been her first clue—she doubted Brett and Viola would have ever smiled for Elizabeth. So who were these two? What did they mean to the kidnapper?

  Maddox stepped farther down the beach. Madison started to climb an abandoned lifeguard stand. But Seneca stayed put. On a hunch, she pulled out her phone and typed in Viola Andrews, which had been Viola’s maiden name. Sure enough, a few stories about Viola’s disappearance and her return appeared. The details matched up to what Viola had told them: She’d gone missing from her neighborhood and no one had seen what happened, but unlike Damien’s story, where Sadie Sage the piano teacher was missing, too, no one seemed to connect that Heather the math tutor had skipped town. It was only after V
iola escaped and she explained who’d taken her did the police dig up some intel on Heather Peony, as Sadie went by then. The images of Heather were grainy, slightly out of focus, but she had the same sharp nose and pointed chin as Elizabeth Ivy and Sadie Sage.

  Seneca kept looking at the woman’s nose. The little girl in the photo they’d found in Catskill had the very same nose. And come to think of it, the boy in the photo had Sadie’s eyebrows, arched high and expressive. They were the only two things that really stood out about either kid—otherwise, they were nondescript-looking, as nondescript as Brett was. Which was probably why Seneca had mistaken Brett for the boy in the photo in the first place.

  Slowly, her mind latched onto a shocking idea. Could it be?

  Family is everything, Maddox had just said. And then she thought about what Freya had told them in the woods about Sadie: She really loved kids. Maybe wanted some of her own.

  “Maddox, Madison,” Seneca called out. Both of them turned quickly, their eyes wide and alert. They ran back to her, perhaps seeing the shock on her face.

  She showed them the picture of the kids, and then a picture of Sadie, pointing out their shared features, their similar genetic traits. “The kids in this picture,” she started, her voice catching and tight, “could they be our kidnapper’s biological children?”

  TWENTY

  “SAY WHAT?” MADDOX stared at Seneca in horror.

  Seneca clutched the picture so hard that the edges crinkled. Not far away, a wave crashed. A car passed on the beach road playing loud hip-hop. A bird—or maybe a bat—soared silently over their heads, giving him a shiver.

  “Could they be the real kids of Elizabeth-Sadie-Heather-whatever-her-name-is?” Seneca repeated. “They look just like her.”

  “Let’s see if there’s any record of her having kids.” Madison’s fingers flew on her phone.

  “And maybe their names are Julia and Alex,” Seneca said.

  Maddox looked at her, surprised. “You mean the names Elizabeth called Viola and Brett?”