“Did you get a good look at him?”
“He was on the other side of the street from me and wearing sunglasses. I don’t know if I’d recognize him again.”
Ellery used her phone to bring up a picture of Wintour. “Could it have been this man?”
Jenna took the phone and studied it. “I don’t think so. The guy I saw was younger. He drove off the same time I did, when Chloe went home with the nanny.”
“Did you get his license plate?”
“No. It was a dark-colored car. Blue, maybe black. I was busy watching for Chloe, so I wasn’t paying too much attention. I only thought about it afterward, when she said some guy was harassing her.” She placed her hands flat on the table. “Wait, are you saying this isn’t the same guy? There was another man after her?”
Ellery and Dorie looked at each other. “We’re going to need to see your text exchanges with Chloe,” Ellery said finally.
“Sure, fine, anything you want. I’ve been over them and over them myself since she went missing.” She swiped around until she found the correspondence with Chloe. “Here. It’s all there.”
Chloe’s last words showed up first on the screen, time stamped from the period when she and Mimi would have been at the street fair, right before she disappeared.:
My mom believes every 1 is a secret killer, but it’s not true. A woman with 2 little kids just tripped and dropped their lunch on the sidewalk. A guy helped her clean it up and bought new hot dogs for her. Ppl are way nicer than she thinks.
Also, I thought about sumthing last nite. If ur my bio mom then Trevor was never my bro. I mean, he wasn’t anyway bcuz he was killed b4 I was born, but now it turns out we’re not even related. I’m sorry for what happened 2 him. But it never had anything to do w/me.
24
Reed was met at the Lockharts’ door by Margery Brimwood. The tender skin under her eyes looked bruised and tired. He wasn’t certain, but he thought she might be wearing the same clothes she had on yesterday, and he wondered if she had been home, if the Lockharts had thought to dismiss her. Her young charge had vanished and now her “Mimi” spent hours drifting in this enormous house without purpose. “Martin is upstairs in the bedroom, but Teresa is in the living room with the captain and the others,” she told him as she prepared to lead the way.
He touched her shoulder and she flinched. “Sorry,” he murmured. “I’d actually like to speak with you for a few moments if I could. How are you holding up?”
She made a noise of disbelief. “Me? I’m fine. It’s not my child who is missing.”
“Yes, it is,” Reed said gently, and she teared up.
“It’s all my fault,” she said as she wiped at her face with the sleeve of her sweater. “I shouldn’t have let her go off like that. I keep waiting for Teresa to shout at me, to fire me. I deserve it. I thought her rules were insane, that they were stifling Chloe and making her unhappy. I thought I knew better than her own mother.”
“When Chloe returns, she’s going to need both of you.”
She leaned against the wall and looked at the ceiling. “I tried to resign. Teresa wouldn’t let me.”
No, Teresa wouldn’t let herself imagine a future when she didn’t need Chloe’s nanny. “I think that’s wise.”
She shook her head. “When the police came to my home, thinking Frank grabbed her, I got so angry. I thought the Lockharts sent them, because they’d called the cops out on me before. I didn’t realize it was the dry cleaner who accused him. I got a lot of stuff wrong, I guess.”
Ah, Reed realized. This was a confession of sorts. “It was you who phoned the tip line about Martin’s affair.”
She gathered the sweater around herself and shot him a guilty look. “I suppose you’re going to tell me I’m wrong about that, too. All I can say is that I saw them kissing a few weeks ago. They didn’t see me. No one here ever does, except for Chloe. It’s like a one-way mirror in this place. I guess that’s why I thought I had figured everything out.”
“You may have more information than you realize. When you pick up Chloe from school, what is your routine?”
She drew a shuddering breath. “Well, school lets out at two fifteen. I pick her up out front and take her to her lessons or back here.”
“Are you always on time?”
“I try to be.” Reed waited in silence while she sat on that equivocation. “Traffic can be unpredictable,” she added. Reed nodded but still didn’t say anything in reply. She huffed out a breath. “Okay, sometimes I’m a little late on purpose, but it’s because Chloe asked me to do it. She said it’s embarrassing being picked up by a nanny in front of her friends, like she’s some kindergarten baby. I figured what’s the harm? There’s teachers and parents and a ton of kids around. Nobody would be stupid enough to try anything right there in front of the school.”
Reed had noticed a pattern with Mimi’s care. “You let her go buy a pretzel by herself at the fair. You let her do her homework in another room at the YMCA.”
“Yes.” She blurted the painful word. “It’s my mistake. I know that now. They told me not to take my eyes off her, not ever. I followed that rule when she was littler. I swear I did. But she started fighting me on it tooth and nail these past couple of years, and I felt like maybe she had a point. How can you be your own person if someone else’s eyes are always on you?”
Reed thought back to his early childhood, when he’d wandered the fragrant, chattering woods at the back of his family’s estate. His mother was usually home but busy with her affairs. Lulabelle cleaned the house and clucked at him if he tracked dirt on her shiny floors. Clark and Henry tended the grounds and the garden. Sometimes they’d let him have the leftover dirt for mud pies, but mostly they waved and ignored him. He’d spent his days climbing trees and using his pocketknife to slice open pinecones, nuts, and berries or whittle sticks into swords. He walked barefoot over the slippery stones in the creek and caught frogs for company. The adults were around but not watching him, an invisible safety net. He could have choked on a berry or fallen out of a tree with hours gone by before anyone found him. Instead, he’d lived a thousand private adventures.
“I see what you’re saying,” he told Margery. “Let me ask you something else. Do you recognize this woman at all?” He used his phone to show her a blown-up picture from Jenna Desmond’s driver’s license.
The nanny held the phone with both hands, moving it up close to her face and then far away. She wanted to say yes, Reed could see. But she shook her head. “She looks like Chloe, if you want to know the truth. But I don’t know her. Who is she?”
“We’re still figuring that out,” Reed said as he tucked his phone away. “What about anyone else who might have been watching Chloe outside the school? Did you notice anyone paying special attention to her? Did she mention anything?”
“No. If she had, I would’ve told the Lockharts. You can be sure of that.”
He pulled out his phone and showed her a still image of the man who’d been loitering nearby when Chloe disappeared from the Common. “What about this man? Do you know him?”