“Upsy-daisy, little Teresa,” Miss Etta said, and helped her to her feet. Tess gasped. Upsy-daisy, just like the word smackings, triggered a flood of terrible memories. Tess longed to shake off the woman’s hands, but, pretending to be just a bit slow, she let Miss Etta lead her from the book barn. They shuffled past the bookmobile, across the dark yard, up onto the porch and through the back door of the big frame house. Though her hands were still tied behind her, she was desperate to flee. She only felt a bit groggy and thought she could do it. But she had to keep telling herself to comply with this woman’s orders until she could find Sandy.

Miss Etta led her up a set of back stairs that must have once been used by servants. How familiar the house seemed. Her ankles burned, and her legs were sore from being tied so long. Her cut wrist pained her. She had to pretend to be subdued, out of it. Her thoughts rampaged when she needed to keep calm.

If Sandy was upstairs, how Tess wanted to comfort the girl. If only Gabe would realize who had taken her, what had happened. Tess tried to recall what she’d said to Peggy when she left the sheriff’s office. She’d been on the phone with that call about a raccoon bite. Tess couldn’t remember if she’d told Peggy that she was going to the library or not.

Gabe would kill her for walking into a trap—if Miss Etta didn’t kill her first.

29

Gabe took Sandy Kenton’s mother aside in the church parking lot being used as the base, where scores of volunteers had fanned out for the search. Some were already reporting in—that they’d found nothing.

“Lindell, I need to tell you something.”

“You’ve found her?” she demanded, grabbing his arm.

“No, though we keep eliminating possibilities. Tess Lockwood’s gone missing. I just wanted you to know that my deputy and I notified the groups before they left to look for Tess too. I know you’ve talked to her lately. Any unusual hints about where she could be?”

The woman’s face went blank for a moment. She’d aged so much in the six days since Sandy disappeared. Stringy hair, no makeup, the ravages of little sleep. The torment of not knowing what was happening to her only daughter—if she was still alive.

“Tess?” she asked, her voice shaky. “Like, the kidnapper’s taken her again? An adult this time?”

“Around noon today, she walked from the sheriff’s office to the library, left there and disappeared.”

Her eyes widened. “Oh, no! Oh, no, no!” She lifted her clasped hands to her mouth, clenching her fingers. “But wouldn’t that mean the same person who has Sandy and Jill wants to harm her—shut her up? Gabe, I know you’ve lived and breathed this.”

“I— Yes, all over again, times three.”

“I hear Tess is special to you. Don’t look so surprised. This is Cold Creek, you know. Word gets around. I felt close to Tess the few times we talked. She helped me so much, not only that she came back, but just that she understood my pain. We have to find her and the girls.”

“You and Win did a great job with the TV plea you made,” he said. “It’s been running on most channels, some nationwide.”

“So the mayor told me. You know, Tess said she’d thought of running home to Michigan, but there was more than one reason to stay here now. She said she had to help you, stay close to you.”

Tears stung his eye. “Thanks, Lindell. She hadn’t put it like that to me. I’d like to keep her here, but all this has to end. I need to find her—and Sandy—fast.”

He touched the brim of his hat and started away, but she grabbed his elbow. “Maybe they’re together. Sandy, Tess and Jill. I’d like to think that. Tess helped me, and I’ll bet she could help Sandy too.”

“Hold that thought. I’ve got to get back to the search. You’ll be the first to know anything,” he told her and headed toward his vehicle.

He got in, started the engine and pulled away. He was so focused on Tess he’d forgotten to tell Lindell that the Ohio State Highway Patrol was going to fly a chopper over local wooded areas using FLIR, heat thermal imaging. Vic was keeping him updated on any tips or other information that came in on the sheriff’s phone lines or reports from searchers in the field. In the field—the standard cop term almost made him laugh, but this time it was literal.

* * *

“Hitchetty-hatchetty, up we go,” Miss Etta recited as they climbed the back stairs, passed the door to the second floor and kept going toward the attic. Tess was convinced Miss Etta sometimes believed Tess was Teresa, a little girl again.

She had hoped that would help to get the woman off guard, but the librarian from hell had outsmarted her again. She held a cocked antique pistol pressed tight to her ribs as they climbed. “As you know I have not one moment’s hesitation about using this!” she’d said, and had given Tess a lecture about the gun’s pioneer history. Tess’s heart nearly pounded out of her chest and not from the exertion of the climb. What if that old gun went off? It was aimed right at her heart.

Miss Etta chattered nonstop about next to nothing until she said something that put Tess on alert. “I swear I’m going to have blisters on my hands from all that digging. It’s been a while since I dug that much, and my shoulder and back muscles are aching like the very dickens. Interesting that one of the greatest writers in the English language had a last name that’s a euphemism for the word devil. That’s Charles Dickens, my dear, but he did have a mistress and was unfaithful to his wife, so he wasn’t lily-white. Your father wasn’t either.”

However much Tess wanted to scream at this woman, she had to try to convince her the drug had made her dopey. “He’s gone,” she mumbled.

“Yes, I know, and that is sad for you Lockwood girls that he’s so far away, but perhaps best he’s out of your lives. In the old days, you know,” she rattled on, “these servant stairs were important. The maids and kitchen help slept on the top floor and needed to go up and down without being seen by the family. Speaking of Dickens, servant stairs are very Victorian. Well, times have changed and even my family doesn’t have an ‘upstairs, downstairs’ lifestyle anymore. And this is hardly Downton Abbey.”

Tess tried to ignore all that and desperately looked for her chance. She concentrated on what she’d say when she saw Sandy Kenton, the treasure for which Gabe had searched so hard. She was excited that the most recent drug that had been injected into her arm wasn’t making her particularly groggy.

Tess prayed she’d be able to keep her head in this. She counted the turns of the stairs, lit by only a ceiling light on each tiny landing. The steps were narrow and steep. Coming down, she could easily fall, especially if she was pulling a child behind her.

“Now, Teresa, I expect you to apologize to Mama Sybil for running off the way you did, when you knew she loved you. It hurt her terribly. Hurt me too in more ways than one. I’m going to leave you with her and Sandy while I finish something outside, but it won’t take me long, and then I’ll be back. You, of course, will be tied, and Sandy will be on Mama Sybil’s lap. Finally, she’s learned to obey. Spare the rod and spoil the child, you know. You learned that much slower than Sandy. You were quite an independent little miss when you first came to live with us.”

Again, Tess had to force herself not to answer back, to tell this demented woman off. It made her sick to her stomach, but she murmured only, “Yes, Miss Etta.”

“Actually that old saying, Spare the rod and spoil the child, only takes its inspiration from the book of Proverbs, but verbatim it goes way back to a poem called Piers Plowman in 1377, and then the adage showed up in another poem in 1662.”

Tess wanted to scream. This seemed a nightmare from which she must surely wake. She longed to tell this woman her trivial knowledge was nothing—nothing!—because she was a monster. But she had to hold herself together. At least Mama Sybil would be in her wheelchair, and she should be able to overtake her when Miss Etta went to finish her business. Of digging graves? Even if Miss Etta locked them in, even if she tied Tess, surely, with Sandy’s help—if she wasn’t drugged—she’d be able to get away, break out, rush downstairs with Sandy, or at least get to a phone in the house to call 911. She’d bet her life—which was probably what she was doing—that this house had a landline, maybe with an old dial phone.