Chapter 3 - THE GOLD BIRD
I took a photograph of the charm and sent it to Ruiz. She called before I could put my phone down.
“Don’t remove it yet,” she said. “I’m on my way.”
Diane arrived first.
She stood on my porch with a casserole dish and the concerned expression she wore whenever she expected an audience. She hugged Emma, then looked past me into the house.
“Where’s Vanessa?”
“At the station.”
“Good.” Diane set the dish down. “Now tell me what happened.”
I told her about the laundry room. I left out the camera.
Diane listened without interrupting. “I warned Nora that people could seem kind until they got close to Emma.”
“When did you warn her?”
“All the time.” She brushed a crumb from the counter. “Mothers worry.”
Emma had gone quiet beside her. I noticed her pulling the rabbit behind her back.
Ruiz arrived and asked Diane whether she recognized the charm.
Diane glanced at it. “A little bird. Why?”
“Have you seen one like it?”
“No.”
Ruiz held her gaze a moment longer, then asked Diane to let us speak privately. Diane’s mouth tightened, but she went out to her car.
Ruiz put the rabbit on the table and examined the charm without opening it.
“There’s a seam,” she said. “We’ll have the lab look at it.”
I stared through the window at Diane’s car. “You think she put a tracker on my daughter?”
“I think we need to find out what it is.”
Ruiz also had news about Ava. Sixteen months earlier, a seven-year-old named Ava Mercer had vanished during a dispute between her parents. Her father said someone had taken her. Her mother claimed he’d hidden her and filed for emergency custody. A judge had placed Ava with her mother. A month later, the family left the state.
“Where are they now?” I asked.
“We’re checking.”
“And Nora?”
“We found her name in the father’s old emails. She’d offered to help him.”
A knock sounded at the back door.
My brother, Caleb, stood outside holding a grocery bag. “Diane called. She said you needed help.”
I let him in. He stopped when he saw the detective.
“What’s going on?”
Before I could answer, his eyes fell on the rabbit. His face changed.
“Where did Emma get that bird?”
I felt the floor tilt beneath me. “You recognize it?”
May you like
Caleb set the groceries down.
“Nora asked me to take one exactly like it out of Emma’s room,” he said. “The week before she died.”
