“She’s done that already. No reply yet.”
Reed spotted a dark-haired woman in sunglasses making her way across the green toward him. “Okay, let me know how the TV spot goes or if there is any further contact about Chloe.”
“Will do.”
He glanced to where Tula had occupied herself by making a young friend by the swings and turned to greet Lisa Frick. Her hair had purple streaks that he could see now that she was closer, and she wore a small stud in her nose. “You must be Ms. Frick,” he said, extending a hand. She did not take it.
“No offense,” she said, “but could I see some ID?”
“Of course.” He supplied his FBI credentials to her, and she studied them closely before handing them back to him.
“Not like I’d know the difference, I suppose,” she said with a resigned sigh. She took off the glasses to assess him. “You do look like the picture I saw on the internet.”
“I assure you I am who I say. Special Agent Reed Markham—and that’s my daughter over there, Tula.” He waved and she returned the gesture with typical childish enthusiasm. He indicated the bench behind them. “Thank you for agreeing to talk with me. Shall we sit?”
She still looked unconvinced, whether about him personally or the purpose of this whole venture he couldn’t say. “I’m supposed to be writing an anthropology paper,” she said as she perched on the edge of the wooden bench, poised as if to flee. “But I’ve been watching the news all morning to see if there’s any update on Chloe.”
“Do you know her?”
She seemed surprised by the question. “Why would I?”
“I thought perhaps you’d kept in touch with Teresa Lockhart.”
Lisa’s jaw hardened and she looked out at the playground for a long moment. “I knew her as Dr. Stone, not Lockhart. We only met once or twice in all the years my mom worked for her family and I was just a kid back then. It’s not like we were friends.”
“I’m very sorry about what happened to your mother.” He’d read enough last night about the case to know the outcome for Carol’s children. No father in the picture, two young kids left orphans. Lisa and her brother, Bobby, had ended up in foster care.
Lisa nodded, unmoved by his statement. “Yeah, you’re sorry. Okay.”
“If you looked me up, you may have seen my background,” he offered.
“FBI man. Right.”
“I mean the part where I was adopted after my mother’s murder. I was five months old at the time. The police couldn’t find who did it, and her killer went free for decades.” The case made headlines again this year when he and Ellery had finally solved it—a bittersweet ending that had changed everything he knew about his family. “She was a Latina teenager living on the edge of poverty in Las Vegas at the time of her death. There was no one to advocate for her and so the case file just gathered dust.”
Lisa unclenched for the first time and she looked at him with a kind of hunger. “Then maybe you do know what it’s like,” she said, her voice soft. “Growing up, my friends would complain about their moms giving them chores, snooping in their stuff, asking stupid questions, and that sort of thing. My foster mom was okay, but she had seven other kids besides me. I’d hear my friends run down their moms and think how if I got sick in school, I had to wait at the nurse’s office, sometimes for hours, before my foster mom could come get me. I’d think how they did sports or clubs and how they ate lunches someone packed for them every day. I ate free lunch. I wanted to tell them to shut up, but I never did because then they’d remember what happened to my mom and feel sorry for me and that was worse.”
“And here you are in graduate school. I bet she’d be proud.”
“Maybe.” Lisa almost smiled. “She cheered like crazy for Beth when she graduated high school.”
“Beth … that’s your sister?”
“She was going to Penn that fall on full scholarship. My mom bought all of us T-shirts. Mine was too big, so I used to sleep in it until it fell apart.” She shook her head. “Everything fell apart. Looking back now, it started when Dad died. We just didn’t know it at the time.”
Reed pulled out his notebook. “Your father was Vincent Frick. You must have been very young when he was killed.”
“He died three years before Mom. We were living in Maryland back then. Dad ran a convenience store six blocks from our house, and he’d walk back and forth to work, no matter the time, no matter the weather, so that Mom could have the car for us kids. One night he was covering a late shift at the store and he never came home. There’d been a big thunderstorm that night—I remember crawling into bed with Beth when the thunder rattled our house. I thought we’d blow away like in The Wizard of Oz. The storm spared our roof, but it got our father. One of the trees fell over when he was walking home and killed him right there.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He looked out for us, though.” Her chin rose, daring Reed to defy it. “He had good life insurance and Mom used the money to move us to Philadelphia.”
“That’s when she started working for the Stones.”
Lisa watched the kids playing for a long moment. “I guess maybe we should’ve stayed in Baltimore, huh?”
“Did you know Trevor Stone at all?”
She gave a half shrug. “Days when we had no school, Bobby and I would go with Mom to work. Trevor was there sometimes. He was cool, I guess. He had these remote-controlled fighting robots, and he let us play with them. Once, he wanted to give us a box of toy cars that he didn’t use anymore, but Mom wouldn’t let us take them. She didn’t like it when the Stones tried to unload their stuff on us, even when we could’ve used it. She’d say, ‘They pay me with money, not with old shoes or toys.’”
“She worked for several other families in the area, is that right?”
“Yeah, she had a regular rotation of about five or six places. Sometimes she’d try to squeeze in a few more, like if it was back-to-school time and we needed new clothes. I liked the Stone place best of all, though. They had a roof garden and a library and the floor when you came in was black and white squares, like a chessboard. I used to wish I could slide down the shiny banister. Now when I think of that floor, I see my mother lying on it with her head bashed in.” She looked sideways at him. “I don’t think this can really be helping you, can it?”
“You never know what might turn out to be important.”
She hunched her shoulders. “No one told me anything back then, but when I realized I could look it up at school on the computer, I saw that the police thought Justin Stone might have done it.”
“What do you think?”
“Kill his brother over some weed or pills? I can’t believe it. But I never met him. Maybe he was crazy or high and didn’t know what he was doing.” She turned to Reed abruptly. “They didn’t come to her funeral, you know.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The Stones. They paid for my mother’s burial, but they didn’t come. It was me, Bobby, and our temporary foster mom—not even one of the ones we ended up staying with. We got split up soon after that. Mom’s friends from church and our neighbors came for the services. Plus, a bunch of strangers who were probably curious about the murders. I didn’t even want to go. We’d been at the cemetery just a month earlier for Beth, and now we were back to put my mom in there with her. It felt like the ground was taking my whole family, one by one.”