“I feel for the girl. I do,” Dorie said. “But you must have seen the news conference this afternoon with Chloe’s parents today.”
He gave a short nod of assent. “I saw.”
“Then you don’t have to imagine how upsetting it is for the Lockharts.”
He hesitated another beat before relenting. “McKenna is upstairs in her bedroom. I’ll show you the way.”
Soon Ellery found herself in another teen girl’s bedroom, this one smaller than Chloe’s but screaming money all the same. McKenna’s room featured gleaming white crown moldings set off against chiffon-pink walls. Her bed was as big as Ellery’s at home, and above it hung a crystal chandelier. McKenna took out her earbuds and put down her phone as her father and the detectives entered her room. “Sweetheart, these officers have a few more questions for you about Chloe,” he explained.
McKenna curled into her overstuffed pillows, hugging a heart-shaped one against her chest. “I said everything I knew already. If I knew where she was right now, I’d tell you. I swear.”
“We believe you,” Dorie assured her. “We just have a few minor details we think you can help us with.”
“Like what?” McKenna asked, still wary.
“Some more information about who Chloe’s friends are. Stuff like that.”
She shrugged one shoulder. “I guess.”
“I’ll be downstairs if you need me,” her father said. He paused at the door and ran his hand down the edge. “We’re all praying for Chloe to come home safely.”
He left and McKenna regarded the detectives. “It’s true,” she said. “We had a special prayer in church for her this morning.”
“Does Chloe go to your church?”
“Only sometimes. Her mom works on Sundays.”
“What do you think of Mrs. Lockhart?” Dorie asked as Ellery wandered about the room. McKenna apparently collected glass figurines of sea creatures. There was a shelf of them next to her desk.
“She’s okay, I guess.” McKenna picked at the edge of her bedspread. “When we were little kids, our families had a picnic at the park and this guy on a motorcycle had an accident right near us. He lost control or something and flipped through the air and landed on his head. Mrs. Lockhart ran over there to give him CPR and other first aid before the ambulance came. My dad told me later she saved that guy’s life, which I guess is pretty cool when you think about it. But mostly, she’s not around when I’m at their house. Mimi is.”
Ellery looked over the truly amazing amount of makeup and jewelry covering the top of McKenna’s vanity. She picked up a metallic blue eyeliner, a brand she didn’t recognize, and put it back down. Her own mother would’ve thrown a fit if she’d tried to wear this stuff at age thirteen. McKenna had tacked some photos along the edges of her large mirror, and Ellery scanned each one in turn, looking for Chloe. Where McKenna had featured prominently in Chloe’s photo stream, Ellery saw only one picture of Chloe in McKenna’s grouping. It showed the girls in pigtails and one-piece swimsuits, obviously taken years ago.
“Did Chloe get along with her mother?” Dorie asked as Ellery continued snooping.
“Not really.” McKenna kept her eyes on Ellery. “No offense or anything, but moms can sometimes be a total drag. Mine won’t let me wear heels higher than one inch. She’s got a ruler to check them and everything. Chloe’s parents were even way more strict. They barely let her out of the house.”
Ellery pointed at the pictures. “Is that why you’ve been hanging out with her less?”
McKenna’s face turned red. “Yeah, I guess. Like, my sister and her friends drove out to Six Flags earlier this summer, and they said they’d bring me and a friend of mine, too. Chloe couldn’t come because of her parents, so I took Brooke instead.”
“Was Chloe ever tempted to sneak out?” asked Dorie.
“She tried once last year when Kevin Rohr was having a pool party. But somehow she set off the alarm in her house. Her parents took away all her electronics for a month after that.” McKenna gave a small shudder of horror at the thought. “Her phone and computer are, like, her lifeline. They may as well’ve put her in a dungeon.”
“Except Chloe had a second phone,” Ellery pointed out.
“Yeah.” There was a touch of admiration in McKenna’s voice. She held her own phone like a talisman between her hands.
“Still no idea who could’ve given it to her?”
A shadow crossed the girl’s face. Ellery could see Dorie saw it, too. “If you know something,” Dorie told her, “now is the time to tell us.”
McKenna blew her bangs out of her eyes. “You’ve got to understand, Chloe was the youngest kid in our class. She wasn’t even thirteen yet and a bunch of us are turning fourteen soon. A couple of the guys are shaving.” At their look of disbelief, she pulled out a picture on her phone to show them. “It’s true! Barnaby’s parents redshirted him. He’s going to be fifteen in December.”
Ellery and Dorie leaned in to squint at a blond kid with no discernible facial hair. “Redshirt?” Ellery asked.
“Held him back when he should’ve started kindergarten. It’s supposed to give you an edge because you’re like a year older or something. Chloe’s parents could’ve had a legit reason for keeping her back because her birthday was so close to the cutoff, but, like, that would’ve been totally insane. She’s wicked smart. Mr. Donovan stopped calling on her in math class because everyone else would just wait for her to get the answer first.”
Ellery had been the smart kid in her early years. By middle school, she’d stopped caring where X went or how to diagram a complex sentence. Her father had left. Daniel got sick. She’d liked school because her friends had shared their extra food with her—cookies and chips and half a sandwich crammed full with meat. All stuff they never had at home. “So, Chloe’s the youngest and she knows lots of answers. How’d that shake out on the playground?”
McKenna made a face that said her classmates wouldn’t be caught dead near a playground. “Chloe tried hard. Too hard. You could see her trying to impress people, but they mostly ignored her or made fun of her behind her back. It’s not like she could invite friends over. The Lockharts would only allow that if they knew the other parents and had met them first. So, sometimes Chloe made up stories. One time she said Tom Brady—you know, the quarterback?”
Dorie suppressed a grin. “We’ve heard of him,” she said dryly.
“Chloe said her parents had a dinner party and Tom and Gisele came. She said Mrs. Lockhart knew him from the hospital, where he stopped by to visit sick kids. A few kids believed her because she had a signed picture from him, but if Tom Brady comes to your house, you’re gonna take a selfie with him, right?”
Ellery thought of the picture of Chloe and the unidentified boy. “Right.”
“It turns out the part about the hospital was true. Mrs. Lockhart got Tom to sign a picture over to Chloe, but Chloe didn’t meet him. He definitely didn’t come to her house for dinner.”
“Okay, so she exaggerates sometimes,” Dorie said.
McKenna took a deep breath. “Right. So, when she said she suddenly had this mystery friend who gave her the phone, I kinda figured that maybe she bought it for herself.”
Now that would be an interesting development, thought Ellery. It would fit with the notion that Chloe orchestrated the disappearance to get back at her parents for their restrictive upbringing. But would a twelve-year-old girl send that vicious text to her mother? Also, Chloe obviously had some sort of destination in mind when she left the park. She had to be somewhere. Ellery pulled out her phone to show McKenna the picture of Chloe and the unknown boy. McKenna’s hand flew to her mouth when she saw it.
“Wait, he’s real?”
“Who’s real? You know this guy?” She tried not to leap on the girl too hard, but she felt the familiar tingle of a developing lead. Finally, they were going to get a name.
“She called him Ty. She said she knew this cool older skater guy and he liked her back
, but he didn’t go to our school. I figured he was just another one of her stories. Like, where’s Chloe going to meet a guy like that? Mimi doesn’t let her out of her sight.”
“Online, maybe,” Dorie offered, and Ellery agreed.
“We really need to get that dump of her computer and cell phone.”
McKenna looked horrified. “Wait, you’re going to like … read all her messages?”
“Don’t worry,” Ellery told her. “We won’t share them around. But if there’s anything in there you think we need to know, it’s better if you tell us now.”
Her shoulders went up around her ears. “No, nothing illegal or anything like that. Just stupid jokes and stuff about boys that I wouldn’t want my dad to read, you know?” She got up from the bed and went to her window—the one with the heavy custom drapes that shimmered as she pushed one aside. “I don’t like to think about her out there by herself. I can’t even believe this is happening. When my dad first told me Chloe was gone, I kept hoping it wasn’t real, that it was just a game she made up to trick her parents. Like hide-and-go-seek or something.” She turned to look at them and Ellery saw a little girl’s frightened gaze pleading under all that eyeliner. “But it’s not, is it? It’s real.”
They didn’t have to answer her because she already knew the truth. Ellery took in the large flat-screen television mounted to the wall, the two-hundred-dollar headphones lying on McKenna’s bed, and the enormous rack of shoes visible through the open closet door. She’d never liked the admonition that “money can’t buy happiness,” because in her experience, the people who said it had never had to go hungry or sleep alone in a car at night. If money wasn’t going to make you happy, it could at least make you comfortable while you dealt with all your other shit. But she felt some sympathy for McKenna, and for her father and all the other parents feeling vulnerable or bewildered. They were learning what Teresa Lockhart surely knew: Tragedy swept in like fog, seeping through the cracks of even the richest homes. Once it happened, it didn’t matter how big or fancy your place was on the outside. Inside, it felt the same.
11
Ellery picked up Bump from the pet sitter and returned to her apartment building to find Reed and Tula hanging out in the lobby. They sat side by side on black armchairs, Reed studying his phone and Tula slumped almost to the floor like something out of a Dalí painting. Reed looked up, expectant at the sight of her. “Anything from the package?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “Several unknown prints. No one saw who left the envelope on the bench.”
“But it’s her hair?”
“It’s human and a color match. That’s all we can say right now. There are no roots available for DNA testing. Everyone is still holding on to the idea that Chloe did this herself to get back at her mom. She’s obviously smart, she left the park on her own, and the shaved head is the kind of dramatic move an angry teenager might make.”
“It’s possible,” Reed agreed. “Overall, this doesn’t fit the pattern of any traditional kidnapping. But she would’ve required help to pull this off. I don’t think a kid that age, especially given her coddled upbringing so far, is surviving on the streets on her own.”
She nodded, exhausted. “We’re still trying to figure out who gave her the second phone. Conroy made us go home for at least six hours. Night shift is taking over for now.”
“Let’s go up, then.”
She looked him up and down as they waited for the elevator. “Conroy said you ran out on him at the Lockhart place.”
“I shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Not with Tula.” He reached out and hugged his daughter to his side. “I phoned him back later and told him what I could. I think Teresa should do another television appearance. At least it keeps the conversation going. If there’s a chance Chloe herself is behind this, she’ll be watching to see that her mother cares to engage.”
Ellery bit back what she wanted to say, which was that the “conversation” was one-way and now possibly involved severed body parts. She curled her fingers inward and looked at the ceiling of the elevator. She’d been anticipating the cool solitude of her loft apartment and instead she now had to play hostess. They crowded awkwardly in the hallway in front of her door while she went through the elaborate process of unlocking it. Tula fidgeted the entire time and then burst through the open portal like a flash flood.
“Is there any ice cream left? What are we having for dinner?”
Bump, who pursued any creature in motion, tore the leash from Ellery’s hand and went galumphing after her. The cacophony of Tula running in circles and the dog barking reverberated off Ellery’s hardwood floors and into her bones. She eased into her own home as though she was checking it for intruders—slow, careful, and with her back to the wall. Behind her, Reed’s Southern accent took on an amused drawl. “We’ll be out of your hair after supper, I assure you. We’ll go to the hotel where she can take a swim before we head out to Philadelphia tomorrow.”
“You’re leaving already?” She felt bereft. She felt relief.
“If I’m to understand the murders at the Stone house, I need to go there myself. Tula will stay with my sister for the day while I poke around to see what I can find out.”
She paused from where she was filling the dog’s dish with water and looked him over searchingly. “You’d do that for me?”
He lounged against the counter next to her. “Well now, I’m not going there for you. I’m going for Chloe and Teresa Lockhart.” He materialized a small cardboard box tied with red-and-white string. “This is for you, though.”
“Mike’s!” she exclaimed with delight, seizing on the box. Inside sat two fat cannoli. “You do love me.”
His expression faltered, just for a moment, and hot shame washed over her as she remembered she had not said the words back to him. She’d tried. She’d practiced in her head a few times, but terror made her throat close up every time she imagined saying them aloud. Everyone she’d ever loved had left her in one way or another. “Maybe not as much as you love food,” he said lightly, nudging her hand with one finger. She curled her hand around his, and this minor contact felt so good that she moved closer, into his intimate space. As always, he took his cues from her, waiting until she signaled she wanted more. They embraced and she tucked her nose into his warm neck. How he managed to smell so divine after a day in the sun remained a mystery. His hand took up a slow caress of her back, and she felt some of the tension in her spine loosen and fall away.
“You’re too good to me.”
“There is no such thing.”
“Ah-hem.” Tula’s loud throat clearing made Ellery jump back from Reed. She turned to find both the girl and the dog staring at them. “What’s for supper?” Tula asked. For emphasis, Bump leaned over and nosed his food bowl.
“I’m working on it,” Ellery told the hound. He whined and stamped a meaty paw to show she wasn’t moving fast enough.
“What about sandwiches from the deli down the street?” Reed suggested.
“Sure, I’ll go,” Ellery volunteered quickly. Her house had too many people in it. She filled the dog’s bowl with kibble and straightened up again, dusting her hands on her jeans.
“Great. Maybe you could take Tula with you while I catch up on email.”
She opened her mouth to object, but the hope on Reed’s face made her shut it again. She swallowed hard and gave a short nod. “Sure, okay.”
Tula looked about as excited as she was by the prospect. “Is it really far?”
Reed tousled her head. “I’ve seen you do fourteen hours straight at Disney World without a single peep. I think you can manage three blocks to the deli.”
Ellery gritted her teeth, fearing she’d be dragging a sullen child with her, but Tula’s natural enthusiasm took over as they reached the outdoors. She moved in a bouncy gait that was almost a skip. “Daddy said your apartment used to be part of a factory.”
“Yep.”
“That’s cool. I want to li
ve in a fire station one day. Like with a sliding pole?”
“I don’t think firefighters actually live at the station.”
“Oh, I don’t want to be a fireman. I want to be an acrobat. See?” Damned if the girl didn’t turn a cartwheel right there on the cement sidewalk. Ellery’s heart lurched at the sight, envisioning Tula with a cracked skull. How the hell did Reed think she could be in charge of a kid?
“Maybe save the tricks for the Big Top, okay?”
They reached an intersection and Tula automatically slid her hand into Ellery’s as they crossed. Ellery almost recoiled but managed to tamp down her instinct to shake off the physical contact. Tula twisted her arm as they reached the other side. “Those marks you got are from the bad guy, right?”
More anxiety, filling up her stomach like a balloon. She had no idea what Reed had told the girl about her history. “Um, yeah. A long time ago.”
“Were you scared when he got you?” Tula still had her hand in a tight grip, swinging it back and forth as they walked.
“Yes.” Ellery glanced down at her. “A lot.”
“I would be, too.”
“He’s in prison now,” Ellery felt compelled to add. “He can’t hurt you.” The feel of Tula’s small, soft hand in hers made her weirdly protective.
“Or you.” She halted and released Ellery’s hand. “I have a scar, too, on my knee right here. See it?”
Ellery could just make out a faint line on Tula’s tawny knee. “I see, yes.”
“I was climbing on some rocks at the beach and I slipped. Mama and Daddy had to take me for stitches. Daddy says the scar is proof of how brave I was.”
“Oh, yeah? He says the same thing to me.”
“Do you believe him?” Tula tilted her head, hanging on the answer.
Ellery looked away, not wanting to lie. “I believe he believes it,” she said finally.
Tula nodded and reinserted her hand into Ellery’s as they began walking. “Yeah, me neither.”
Every Waking Hour Page 10