Chapter 5 - SOMEONE CAME BACK
Every light in the house went out at once.
Noah started crying upstairs with the officer assigned to him.
I ran.
“Mr. Mercer!” Ortiz shouted behind me.
I took the stairs two at a time.
The nursery door was open.
The officer lay in the hallway, conscious but bleeding from the forehead.
“Noah?” I yelled.
A cry came from inside.
I found him in his crib.
Alive.
Tessa rushed past me and lifted him.
Then she stopped.
“The bear.”
Noah’s stuffed bear was gone.
It sounded ridiculous until she turned to me.
“Amelia sewed something into it.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. She just told me never to throw it away.”
We heard glass break downstairs.
Ortiz ordered us into the bathroom and sent officers through the house.
Ten minutes later, they found the rear door open and wet footprints across the kitchen.
The blue safe had been emptied.
Except for one photograph.
It showed Amelia standing beside Malcolm Vale at a charity dinner. Vivienne stood in the background, watching them.
On the back, Amelia had written:
He thinks I only found the money.
I found the children.
I stared at the words.
“What children?”
Tessa looked as confused as I felt.
Then Noah reached into the pocket of Tessa’s sweater.
He pulled out something small and plastic.
A blue memory card.
Tessa’s eyes widened.
“I found it on the nursery floor after the alarm.”
Ortiz took it.
We loaded it into her laptop.
There was one video file.
Amelia appeared on-screen, sitting in the same nursery.
She looked directly into the camera.
“If Elliot is watching this,” she said, “then Malcolm Vale finally came for Noah.”
I stopped breathing.
May you like
Amelia continued.
“And if he came for Noah, he already knows I discovered what happened to the twelve babies in Hartford.”
