Chapter 15 - A Child's Message

For one terrible hour, we had no idea where Lucy was.

Then Elena's phone rang.

It was Dana Finch, shouting and crying at the same time. Lucy had called from an unknown number, said she was inside a building where the walls shook when trucks passed, and whispered that there was a painted yellow circle on the floor.

"She hung up before I could ask anything," Dana said.

Elena looked at me. "My father used to take me to an old repair garage near the rail yard. There was a yellow circle painted around a floor drain."

I handed the address to Bell and stayed off the road as she'd ordered. Every instinct in me screamed to drive there anyway.

"Why aren't you going?" Elena asked.

"Because I might get a child killed trying to feel useful."

She nodded. It wasn't praise. It was agreement.

The police found Lucy two hours later in the garage's locked office. She was frightened, hungry, and furious with everyone for taking so long. She had hidden a borrowed phone inside her shoe when Victor's men searched her jacket.

Dana met her at the hospital. Elena went with them. I watched from a doorway as mother and daughter clung to each other.

A little girl was alive. For once, the outcome didn't depend on my power.

Lucy had also kept something else. The last time she saw Victor, he was telling Shaw that the old woman knew where "the original book" had been hidden.

"What book?" Bell asked me the next morning.

I thought about my father's ledgers, the old sewing chest, and the way Teresa had touched the carved V.

"I don't know," I said. "But I think my mother does."

When I returned home, Elena was asleep in the kitchen chair, still wearing yesterday's clothes. I covered her with a blanket.

She woke before I reached the doorway.

"Did they get Victor?"

"No."

"Then we aren't finished."

"No," I said. "We aren't."

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From upstairs came a crash, followed by my mother's bell ringing hard and fast.

By the time we reached her room, the window was open, the bedside drawer lay on the floor, and Teresa was pointing at the empty place where her notebook had been.