“Clever move since I told Marian to steer clear of you. I didn’t take out a restraining order but threatened to. But I still can’t blame—”

“Me either. Blame her. I guess I’d move heaven and earth to get my girl back.”

Tess thought again of Lee and Gracie in that religious group. They wanted to help their kids, but as far as she was concerned, they were actually endangering them.

“I kind of got the idea just now that Ann considers you her very close friend,” Tess blurted out.

“We’ve dated, but I’m not as close to any next steps as she—and her band of brothers—like to think.”

“Oh,” she said, sounding stupid to herself. This was not only the wrong time and place for that talk, but truly none of her business. Except for that kiss.

“Want to see Victor Reingold after all this time?” Gabe asked. “We were just going over things, so maybe you can help—and if not, fine. Anything else new?”

“I’ll see him. Like I said before, though his hard work didn’t locate me, I’ve always been grateful to him, and Mom was too. But nothing else is new.”

She almost told Gabe about the screams at the Hear Ye compound. It was like lying to him not to, but she’d tell him later, if she was sure he and Agent Reingold wouldn’t go in there like gangbusters. Or maybe they’d tell her something so that she could explain her suspicions to them. Maybe it would be better if she went back in there without law enforcement.

Gabe walked her down the hall, past his deputy’s office and his own to the last room before the door that said Detention. It had a big lock and a grated window high on the door, so it must be the jail cell.

“Vic, you remember Tess Lockwood,” Gabe said as they entered a big conference room.

“Sure do, but not looking like that,” Vic said as he got up to come around the table.

It was what Tess could only call a war room. Kate had taken her to London for a week a few years ago, and they’d seen Winston Churchill’s World War II war rooms deep underground. This was similar to what they’d seen there—wall maps with lines of yarn stuck in with pins on bulletin boards, piles of papers, strewn photos. But here, two laptops sat on the table.

Agent Reingold walked closer, limping. Had he always limped?

“Hey, my favorite survivor,” he said, his voice gruff. The man had tears in his eyes. He held her at arm’s length with his hands on her shoulders and studied her. “You look great, Ter—Tess.”

“You too, Agent Reingold.”

“Hey, no little white lies now,” he said, making her feel guilty again as he pulled out a chair for her and Gabe sat beside her. Agent Reingold made his way back around the table. “We appreciate your trying with Gabe—to remember anything,” he added hastily. “And you can call me Vic, since we go way back, okay?”

“Okay, sure. I don’t mean to intrude, but I thought if I knew about Sandy Kenton’s clues—disappearance—it might make me remember something, if, that is, it’s not privileged information.”

“What is privileged, we’ll keep quiet,” Gabe said, “but we’ve scheduled a news conference in about half an hour in the town square. You might want to keep a low profile until the media scatter—if that even gets rid of them. Then we could walk down the alley if you want to see the storage room the girl disappeared from, but it’s a far cry from a cornfield.”

A far cry, echoed in Tess’s head. She heard again that girl’s screams from that Hear Ye building, even heard her own scream years ago before the monster came and darkness descended.

“That would be fine,” she said.

“You can just wait here,” Gabe said. “It does appear Sandy might have known her abductor, because she evidently walked a ways outside with him—or her—before getting in a vehicle. We figured that out from using a tracker and his dog. I’m not sure you ever knew this, Tess, but when you were taken, Sam Jeffers and one of his tracking dogs followed your scent through the cornfield. When the hound lost the trail, we tried to go by where the corn looked pushed aside or disturbed.”

Disturbed. Why hadn’t Gabe, her mother—someone—ever told her they’d tried to track her before? They’d tried to protect her when facing memories might have been better. She was desperate to face—and recall—them now.

“Also,” Vic said, “when the dog lost your scent—probably because you were then being carried—we tried to lift the hound to see if he could catch your scent off cornstalks or hanging ears you might have brushed against. No go.”

“A minute ago you referred to my abductor as him or her. Do you think it could have been a woman?”

“Standard procedure,” Vic said. “We assume it’s a man, but we don’t know for sure. A young girl’s taken, then people jump to conclusions. But you came back physically intact, Tess, and that’s hardly ever the case if a man takes a young girl.”

Not raped, he meant. Yet she’d been drugged and beaten. But how that happened or by whom was long gone.

Leaning closer to her, Gabe said, “You’ve got to realize if you sit in with us—which we both want you to—the talk gets tough at times.”

“I understand. And you handled that very carefully—I was returned intact.” But I still feel like I’m in a million pieces sometimes, she told herself. Then she recalled the reason she came.

“Gabe, about dealing with Marian Bell. Was there anything in her daughter’s disappearance that could be a tie-in to me or the others who went missing?”

“Only that she was taken from her backyard, which Marian says is a big enough link,” Gabe explained. Vic looked up from writing something down, longhand, when a laptop was right beside him.

Gabe went on, “She was out there with her pet cat, which was left behind. Not a peep, not a sound. Did take her jacket though, which she’d earlier discarded. It was as if the abductor cared that she stayed warm and was not in a total rush to grab and go. No drag marks, tire marks, no trace, no witnesses, so basically that’s the same.”

“So why aren’t you convinced Amanda could have been taken by the same person?”

“Her father took flights from Columbus to Miami to Rio the next day. No child was with him, but there was one who matched Amanda’s description with a woman on an earlier flight to Rio. The child had a passport, of course, but not with Amanda’s name. And then, even though her father had done business in Rio and had contacts there, the trail—Amanda’s father, Peter Bell, the woman’s and the child’s—grows completely cold.”

“Poor Marian.”

“First we worked with the police in Rio. Now Marian’s hired a private detective. I’d bet my house Amanda’s father is down there under an assumed name with his daughter and the woman he loves. He and Marian were going through a bitter divorce and they both wanted custody of their only child.”

A bitter divorce, like my parents, Tess thought, though that similarity obviously ended there. The order of her being taken and Dad’s leaving was the reverse of what had happened to Marian and her daughter. But, because Tess was a tomboy when she was small and her older sisters were more like Mom, Tess had always felt—Kate and Char had too—Dad favored Tess. But there was no way her own father would have taken her, even if Amanda’s did.

“Jill Stillwell, the second girl who was taken, and then Sandy—no problems between the parents, right?” she asked.

“Not a factor,” Gabe and Vic said, almost in unison.

“Good head on your shoulders though, Tess,” Vic said. He looked back to what she assumed were his notes for the news conference.

Gabe, elbows on the cluttered table, said, “Let me go over with you what we do know and can share about Sandy’s disappearance.”

He talked about the child’s play area in the back room of the store. He mentioned a well-timed phone call her mother took from a customer, which might have been part of a setup—a call they were trying to trace. The fact that the girl had never strayed on her own was noted. The chaos of the crime scene. The Barbie doll and the soiled, tattered scarecrow they couldn’t account for.