Chapter 9 - Someone Broke In
Emily refused my offer to move into the Ashford house.
"I met you yesterday," she said. "I believe the DNA. I believe you're my mother. But I need one thing in my life to stay normal."
I understood.
So she went home to the small apartment she shared with her foster mother, Ruth Hart, on the edge of town.
At 11:42 p.m., she called me screaming.
I reached the apartment before the police finished taking photographs.
The front door had been forced open.
Drawers were dumped across the floor. Couch cushions had been sliced. Family photographs lay shattered in the hallway.
Ruth sat at the kitchen table with an ice pack against her temple.
"He shoved me," she said. "Tall man. Baseball cap. Gloves. He kept asking where the necklace was."
Emily touched her throat.
The locket was gone.
She had taken it off before showering and left it in her bedroom drawer.
The intruder ignored cash, jewelry, and electronics.
He stole only the locket.
Detective Brooks looked at me. "Who knew it mattered?"
"Half the restaurant," Emily said bitterly.
Kevin had already preserved security footage from the dining room. Sarah had photographed the locket. The note from inside it was sealed in her office safe.
Whoever broke in had stolen a symbol, not the evidence.
But Ruth was shaking.
I knelt beside her.
"I'm so sorry."
She looked at me with tired blue eyes.
"Don't apologize. Find out who did this to her."
Then she reached under the table and pulled out a battered cardboard box.
"And maybe this will help."
Emily frowned. "What is that?"
"Everything that came with you from St. Anne's. I never showed you all of it because the social worker told me it was mostly junk."
Inside were old intake forms, a knitted blanket, a plastic hospital bracelet with faded ink, and three Polaroids.
One showed baby Emily in a convent crib.
The second showed Sister Agnes holding her.
The third made my blood run cold.
A man stood in the background near the doorway, half turned away from the camera.
Thomas.
On the white border, Sister Agnes had written a date and one sentence.
He came back twice to make sure she was still here.
Emily stared at the photograph.
"Why would he come back?"
Ruth reached deeper into the box.
"Maybe because of this."
She held up an unopened envelope addressed to Emily in Sister Agnes's handwriting.
May you like
Across the front were five words:
OPEN IF THOMAS FINDS YOU.
