Wouldn’t you have seen him? Heard him?
This was ridiculous!
She needed help!
She threw on her coat, gloves, and boots, took the time to light the one candle she’d seen in the living room with an ember from the fire, then, with her phone clutched in her hand, she walked to the door and punched out Detective Alvarez’s number.
What would she say? She’d lost the kid? Trace hadn’t come back from the barns?
That was foolish.
She didn’t care.
“Better safe than sorry,” she said, looking through the windows, feeling the seconds ticking by as the snow continued to pile and drift. When the detective didn’t answer, Kacey hung up, didn’t leave a message.
Not yet.
She’d find Trace first, she thought, pocketing her phone and opening the door to the cold, dark night.
As she stepped outside a wall of cold air hit her so hard it seemed to strip any warmth from her body. Her skin chilled immediately and she wished she’d taken the time to grab a scarf and hat. Over the keen of the wind, she thought, again, she heard chains rattling, like those on an empty flagpole, or the clinking sound of shackled prisoners walking.
All in your imagination. Keep moving.
Swallowing back her fear, she followed the trail of footprints she’d seen earlier that were nearly covered now, but she kept after them, not toward the barns, but around the corner of the house, past a snow-covered rhododendron bush to the side of Trace’s home where more footprints had clus
tered.
It was impossible to confirm, of course, to make out anything definitive with the snow blowing over the area. Over the wind she heard the branch still battering the house. Looking up, forcing the dying flashlight beam skyward, she not only saw the pine slapping at the siding, she noticed one of those fire-escape ladders hanging from the window of the extra bedroom.
The ladder moved with the wind, its chains rattling like the bones of the dead.
Her heart plummeted.
She knew in a heartbeat that Eli, with his broken arm, had somehow slithered down this ladder and disappeared into the frigid, unforgiving night.
CHAPTER 35
Noreen Johnson had sunk onto the piano bench, her shoulders hunched together, but, Alvarez observed, hadn’t yet given up the fight. “For the love of God, Gerald, why couldn’t you keep your pants up! First Robert, with that awful Lindley woman ... and of course you had to hire him so that I could be reminded every single day of your betrayal and now ... now another one? How could you?” Her cheeks flamed red.
“What’s done is done,” Gerald said wearily. “We can talk about this later. For now, I think the detectives have some questions they want answered.”
“It’s over!” she whispered. “Our life, the one we knew is over.”
Gerald cleared his throat and kept his tense gaze toward Pescoli and Alvarez. “What can I do for you, detectives?” he asked, leaning forward, hands clasped between his knees.
Alvarez took the lead, asking him a series of questions. Gerald Johnson swore he’d never met the victims, hadn’t known they could be sired by him, hadn’t even guessed it until Acacia had shown up earlier in the day. He had no idea if any of them had any enemies, but he was certain from his children’s reaction earlier that they were as surprised as he.
Pescoli was keeping to herself, observing, though more than once, Alvarez caught her partner studying the screen that had appeared when the television clicked off. Maybe it was her way of calming her aggression, but just listening, not interacting was certainly out of character for her.
Alvarez took another quick look at the TV screen. Nothing out of the ordinary. The current photo was of a family portrait taken years before, with Gerald and Noreen twenty-five or thirty years younger, their children spread around them in matching outfits, the boys in white shirts, navy vests, and khaki slacks; the three girls in red dresses. Someone had added their names to the digital picture.
“We have nothing to tell you,” Noreen insisted, and sent her husband a silent message. She tried, once again, to call one of her children to no avail. “Where are they?” she whispered and closed her eyes. “Don’t they know that we need them?”
Pescoli said, “You had seven children?”
“I had seven,” Noreen clarified, sniffing angrily. “Gerald obviously had a few more.”
“What happened to your daughters? Agatha and Kathleen?” Pescoli asked.