She couldn’t see his face; she leaned back so she wouldn’t have to see him at all. Will, she thought, was still in the house, managing the situation. As much as a situation like this might be managed. It was a runaway train, decimating everything in its path.
She’d told Detective Crowe everything—from the moment she met Pearl to the moment her sister had saved her life. She told him everything that Cora told her, too. How Pearl had been shadowing their lives for years, and Selena never knew she existed. She let it all go. Every secret and lie. He’d scribbled it all in his little book.
“I had a visitor today,” said Crowe. “A man named Hunter Ross, a private detective.”
The world was fuzzy and unreal, his voice sounded far away. But she listened.
“He was the cold case investigator hired when a woman named Stella Behr was murdered and her fifteen-year-old daughter, Pearl, went missing, more than ten years ago now. A man in her mother’s life was suspected of the murder, and of Pearl’s abduction. Their case went unsolved and the department brought Ross in to keep following up leads.”
Selena let the information sink in. She thought of the girl her mother described, thin and feral, following Cora in the grocery store. Someone on the outside, looking for a way in. Or maybe Cora was right about Pearl. That she was just a destroyer. Someone in pain, looking to give pain to others. She could be either. Or both.
“Our father abandoned her,” said Selena. “Then her mother was murdered, and she was abducted?”
Cora had never said anything about Stella, or Pearl’s suspected abduction. Maybe she didn’t know. Or maybe it was just another thing she hid. So many layers, so many secrets buried deep. Pearl was a child. Who took her? Where was she all those years before she showed up in their lives?
“Ross was never able to find them,” said Crowe. “A man named Charles Finch, a con artist, had apparently worked his way into Stella Behr’s life in the months before her murder. But he was a ghost. Hunter Ross believes that Finch killed Behr, and abducted Pearl, raised her as his own.”
Selena thought about Pearl, that darkness in her. No wonder.
“But, believe it or not, that’s not who he came to see me about today,” said Detective Crowe.
He took a picture out of the file he gripped in his hand. There was a picture of a young girl with golden curls and sad eyes. She was many years younger, but Selena recognized her right away. The paper shook a little in Selena’s hand.
“This is Gracie Stevenson,” said Crowe. “Her mother was also murdered, and she, too, has been missing since that night.”
“It’s Geneva,” said Selena.
Crowe nodded.
“Same scenario, a man worked his way into the life of Gracie’s mother, Maggie. Maggie was strangled in her bed, just like Stella. And Gracie disappeared. When Hunter Ross saw Geneva’s picture on the news, he recognized her. All these years, he’s kept investigating both cases, following stories he heard in the news, pinging the system for any new DNA evidence. Nothing until now.”
Selena struggled with it, how the pieces fit together.
“So, they were connected,” said Selena. “You think the same man abducted them both?”
“This woman,” said Detective Crowe, holding up a picture of a young Pearl, “is the sister that reported Geneva missing in the first place.”
“They were working together,” said Selena. How could that be? Selena met Geneva on the playground. She alone had invited Geneva into their lives. But maybe that was the plan all along. Maybe that was all part of a long game that started years ago.
Crowe went on. “Maggie Stevenson’s murder was never solved. Gracie was never found. And the man who was part of their lives, they knew him as James Parker, another ghost. Not even a picture of him left behind. They all disappeared.”
“I don’t understand.”
Outside, the volume was coming up, voices raised a little, news vans arriving.
“Charles Finch, Pearl, Grace—they’re con artists,” said Crowe. “Working their way into people’s lives and taking what they can get.”
Con artists. It seemed like such an old-fashioned idea, something almost amusing, harmless, a minor scam like a shell game or three-card monte. An email that you might get from a Nigerian prince. Not this. Not lives destroyed, women hurt and killed.
“So, Geneva works her way into my home, becomes our nanny, then seduces Graham with the intent to blackmail him. And Pearl? What’s her role in