Shadow Falls

by Wendy Dranfield

  Nate looks at her. “I’m pretty sure Morgan won’t tell us anything, and his mother-in-law is probably speaking to him right this minute. So our best bet is to drag it out of Anna and find out whether there’s any link between them knowing each other and Jenny going missing.”

  Madison nods. “When she was falling asleep last night, she let out a bit more than she wanted, I think.”

  “Really? What did she say?”

  “I thought she implied that she and Grant once had another child, but it could’ve been the drugs and the exhaustion confusing her. I asked her why they adopted when she can obviously get pregnant, and she said she had wanted to help a child in need but that it had been a mistake because they didn’t need another child.”

  Nate can’t think of any reason why they wouldn’t have heard about the other child, if one existed. But then Anna and Grant kept the new baby a secret too. “This is getting weird.”

  “I agree. You’d think they’d want us to know everything in order to find their daughter.”

  He pulls his cell phone out and looks at the photo he took of Taylor.

  Madison leans in. “It’s hard to tell with kids, but she doesn’t look like the portraits we saw.”

  He agrees. He starts a text to Rex.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Asking Rex to dig a little deeper. He needs to check whether the Lucases have any more kids, by searching birth records with the health department. You never know, maybe a child disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Jenny might not be the first.”

  She looks horrified at the suggestion. “God, I hope not.”

  He starts the car. “The fact that they’re hiding things suggests one or both of them are guilty of something.”

  “I agree. We need to assume they’re our best suspects at this point.” Her face turns pale. “Oh my God.”

  “What?”

  She looks at him slowly. “What if Esme’s death wasn’t natural?”

  He swallows as he realizes where she’s going with this.

  She continues. “What if she found something and they had to kill her in order to silence her?”

  He shakes his head. “No. I don’t think that’s plausible. They let Esme live with them, which they wouldn’t do if they had something to hide, surely? Besides, anything suspicious about her death would show up during autopsy.”

  Madison runs her hand through her hair and leans back against the headrest. “You’re right. This case is sending me crazy. I can’t imagine either of them killing Esme.”

  Nate remembers something Esme told him when they first met her in Santa Barbara. “Jenny’s best friend.”

  “What?” asks Madison.

  “Esme said Jenny had a best friend but he’d moved away. She emailed me his mother’s cell number.”

  Realizing where he’s going with it, Madison says, “You think she’ll know if they had more kids?”

  He turns the engine off. “It’s highly likely.” He doesn’t feel like he’s the best person to talk to the woman at the moment. He’s still distracted by Father Connor’s email and he doesn’t want to mess this up. He turns to Madison. “Why don’t you call her? You’ve got more experience of speaking to a victim’s friends and family than me.”

  Madison jumps at the chance and pulls out her phone. “Read out the number.”

  Seventy-Four

  Anna’s been sedated, so she’s feeling sleepy. This morning’s nurse caught her staggering along the corridor, and when she fought to be allowed to leave the hospital, she collapsed with more stomach pains. After a lot of fuss, she’s been put under observation, so she’ll never get out of here to find Grant now.

  She’s tired. Her hand strokes her bump as the baby kicks. It feels like she wants out too. Anna has decided to call her Esme, in memory of Grant’s mother. He’ll like that. She sent him a text to let him know, but he hasn’t replied, which makes her wonder if she’ll ever see him again. It doesn’t really matter one way or another, because as long as she can keep this baby, she’ll be happy. No one can hurt her now.

  She thinks of everything they went through to adopt Jennifer. It was a long slog and there were several moments along the way when she doubted their decision. They already had two beautiful children: Susie and Thomas. Her life was filled with working at the school part-time, looking after the kids and keeping up with their busy schedules.

  As a family unit, they were happy. Their friends asked them why they would adopt instead of trying for more of their own, but Anna had been adopted herself when she was six, and she was lucky enough to have been chosen by a wonderful family who’d given her everything she could ever have wished for. She wanted to give another child the same chance.

  She remembered living in foster care during her early years. Her foster mother was a horrible woman who used to slap her every time she came in from the yard with dirt on her dress, or every time she couldn’t finish her dinner. There was always a reason to slap her. When she’d told her social worker, he had just laughed and said she had an overactive imagination.

  She felt she wanted to get a child out of foster care. After all, they could certainly afford it, and they had the room. Grant had taken some persuading, but when they first met Jennie Scott, as she was known then, he had bonded with her instantly. She seemed like a shy girl, with a pleasant manner. She was eager to please and gave them lots of drawings of them all together as a family. She was nine at the time, and therefore had little hope of being adopted until they came along. When Grant insisted she would fit well into their family, Anna agreed, and they renamed her Jennifer Lucas. Grant and Esme immediately referred to her as Jenny, but Anna never did. She found herself unable to abbreviate her name, like it was too familiar for the level of intimacy they shared.

  There was something about Jennifer’s eyes that unnerved her. Almost from the very beginning of their relationship, the girl looked at her slyly. A look reserved just for her. Esme loved the child instantly, of course, and doted on her. Anna wonders if that made the underlying friction between herself and Jennifer worse, because she was the only one to have reservations.

  It took seven months for Jennifer to finally move in with them. By then, they were almost all bonded. Three-year-old Susie loved tying her new sister’s hair up in scrunchies and clips, and Thomas, being just eighteen months old at that time, followed her around the house. Jennifer played gently with them and it all appeared to be working.

  It took less than a year for things to take a turn for the worse, and Anna bitterly wishes she could go back in time and stop the adoption from ever happening. The more she thinks about it, the quicker the heart monitor next to her beeps.

  Her cell phone rings. When she realizes who’s calling, she hesitates and a blanket of dread envelops her.

  “Ted?” she says, trying not to panic.

  “What’s going on? I’m taking heat from my boss for being incompetent, and those investigators have been at my mother-in-law’s house to check if my daughter is Jenny! This is getting out of control.”

  “What?” she whispers. “Why are they investigating you?”

  “Nate Monroe asked me if you and I had dated back in college, so he’s found out something. I don’t know how. I sure as hell didn’t tell anyone.”

  “Neither did I,” she says.

  “Could it have been Grant? That guy hates me, so I wouldn’t put it past him. Is he there?”

  She doesn’t reply.

  “Anna? Where’s Grant?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t get hold of him. I think he’s on his way up here, because he was driving last time I spoke to him. Ted, the investigators don’t actually know anything; they’re just speculating. Please stay calm.”

  “How can I stay calm? My job and my freedom are on the line. I did this for you! I should never have answered your phone call that day. I wish to God I’d never met you or your asshole husband.” His voice sounds shaky and she hears him taking deep breaths to calm himself.
/>   “Ted? I’m scared.” Everything’s unraveling.

  “You’re right to be scared,” he snaps. “This whole situation is fucked up. I need to speak to Grant. If you see him before I do, get him to call me ASAP.”

  He ends the call before she can reply.

  She tries to figure out how Nate and Madison learned about her relationship with Ted, and curses Esme for getting PIs involved.

  She drops her phone on the bed and leans back, considering her options. It doesn’t take her long to realize she has none. She has to see this out to the bitter end, with or without Ted and Grant’s support.

  Seventy-five

  The office of Dr. Pamela Jarvis

  There’s a knock at her door and Stephen sticks his head in. “The lieutenant will be here within the hour. He says the DA’s office need the journal as soon as possible.”

  She nods. “I’ll be ready. I’ve almost finished.”

  He closes the door behind him as she turns back to Jennie’s CPS record. It would seem she was difficult to place, which is unusual, because babies always get adopted first. After being taken from her mother at nineteen months, she spent the next seven years in different foster homes, always being moved around, as if no one wanted her long-term. In her notes she was described as a whiny baby who never settled. At four she was playing with matches, and at five she cut her foster family’s dog with a steak knife, claiming it was an accident. Trouble seemed to follow the girl.

  The next page is a hospital report. It seems Jennie attempted suicide by slashing herself from elbow to wrist. Pamela checks the year and works out she was just eight at the time.

  She turns the page to a statement written by one of Jennie’s foster moms.

  I kept expecting to wake up in the middle of the night with her standing over me, ready to slit my throat. We didn’t bond at all, but she loved my husband. I couldn’t understand why she hated me so much. I felt scared in my own home.

  Her stomach leaps with dread. She turns to Anna Lucas’s journal.

  She loves Grant more than me. I feel afraid around her. I’m scared she’ll hurt me one day. She’s so angelic around Grant. That’s why he doesn’t believe me when I tell him how the girl treats me. Instead he looks at me with pity, as if I’m going insane and need taking care of. It infuriates me to the point that I don’t tell him about it anymore.

  She thinks about it. Now she knows the girl’s history before she was adopted, she wonders if it’s possible she was suffering from some kind of attachment disorder. She flicks through her CPS file to the last few pages and finds an envelope with a “sealed by the family court” stamp across it, with a judge’s name and a contact number for his office. Pamela has come across these before, usually when there’s something that has been ordered to remain confidential until the child turns eighteen, such as the biological parents’ details, the court transcripts if the child was removed from the parents, or any juvenile record that is deemed sensitive. She’s nervous that her client would not have had access to anything sealed in this envelope before she adopted Jennie Scott.

  Knowing it will be read by the police anyway, she tears the envelope open and finds a child therapist’s report amongst the paperwork. She briefly skims it.

  In my opinion this girl suffers with reactive attachment disorder and is extremely dangerous to any potential family she enters. She needs intensive treatment before she is placed for adoption. It’s my recommendation that she remains in the care of CPS until she has received successful treatment.

  She wonders why the adoptive parents weren’t told about this. Could it have been sealed with the other paperwork by mistake? Or by a well-meaning social worker who didn’t want to put off a potential new family for Jennie? She’ll never know. But the consequences have been catastrophic.

  Although she’s heard of RAD, she doesn’t know much about it, so she turns to her laptop and searches for an explanation. She clicks on the first link:

  Reactive attachment disorder is a condition found in children who have not had the opportunity to bond with their primary caregivers before age five, usually as a result of gross neglect and abuse from the carer’s side. The absence of love and warmth early on, in conjunction with harmful behavior from the primary caregivers, can cause severe harmful effects throughout the child’s life.

  The symptoms are listed: selective about who they positively interact with, control issues, anger management problems, limited sense of humor, aversion to physical affection, unhealthy relationship with one of the new primary caregivers if taken away from their own family, difficulty relating to others, manipulative or passive-aggressive tendencies.

  Pamela has read enough. She closes the file and leans back in her seat. The mother was right all along. All those times she spoke about Jennifer hurting her, Pamela genuinely thought the girl was just physicalizing the pain she was experiencing from years of being passed around different foster homes. She also thought Anna was overreacting, as so many adoptive mothers do because they want their relationship with the new child to be perfect. She had no idea Jennifer was suffering from this disorder, but she should have figured it out after Anna told her she thought the child was evil.

  She curses herself. Why didn’t she pick up on that during their sessions and take it more seriously? She realizes she could have altered the outcome of this terrible situation. Her lack of action means this is professional negligence.

  She looks at Anna’s journal and notices there’s only one passage left. She checks the date and realizes it was written the same week that Jennifer disappeared. Her hands start shaking.

  Seventy-Six

  Madison calls the mother of Jennifer Lucas’s best friend.

  No one answers, so she leaves a message. “Hi, this is Madison Harper calling for Sian. I’m looking into the disappearance of Jennifer Lucas and I was hoping I could ask a few quick questions, as I believe your son was good friends with her. Call me back when you get this, it could be important. Thanks.”

  Nate starts the Jeep’s engine and is about to drive to the hospital when Madison’s phone rings.

  She looks at him before answering. “That was quick. Hi, Madison Harper here.”

  “Hi, you just left me a message?” A tentative female voice.

  “Yes. Thanks for returning my call so quickly.”

  She sounds shaky. “When I heard what it was about, I kind of figured I had no choice. Has Jenny not been found yet?”

  “Afraid not. We’re really struggling with leads, so we’re looking into all possibilities at the moment.”

  “Oh. Poor Anna. I heard Esme passed away, is that right?”

  Madison wonders where she heard that from so quickly. “Unfortunately, it is, yeah. It was Esme who hired me, actually.”

  Sian doesn’t respond for a minute. “You’re not with the police?”

  “No, I’m a private investigator. Esme wanted a little extra reassurance, I think. But I’m working in conjunction with the police up here at the summer camp.” She looks at Nate, who’s trying to hear the other side of the conversation.

  “What did you want to ask?” says Sian.

  Madison doesn’t want to give away the fact that she knows nothing about any other child Anna and Grant might have, so she has to bluff a little. “I want to know about the other children in the Lucas family.”

  Sian gasps.

  When she doesn’t respond, Madison asks, “Is there something wrong?”

  When Sian speaks again, it’s obvious she’s crying. “I haven’t thought about them for a while, that’s all.”

  Madison is concerned at her reaction. This doesn’t sound good. Gently, she prods. “Could you tell me what happened?”

  “Why don’t you just ask Anna?”

  “I’m trying to minimize her suffering, as she has a lot to worry about right now. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m going to put you on loudspeaker so my colleague can listen in.”

 
; Sian sniffs. “Okay. Well, before they adopted Jenny, they already had two children: Susie, who attended the elementary school where Anna works, and Thomas. They both died in a terrible accident at their home about a year ago now.”

  Madison’s heart sinks, but her mind is buzzing. Why on earth would the Lucases have kept that from them? Behind her, Brody sits up.

  “It was awful, Ms. Harper. Anna and Grant fell apart and Jenny started acting up, which is totally understandable as she was only eleven herself and had just lost her younger siblings.”

  Madison puts the time frame together in her head: they lost their two youngest children in an accident a year ago, and now they’ve lost their only surviving child. What the hell is going on in that home?

  “What was the cause of death?” asks Nate, leaning in.

  Sian takes a deep breath. Her voice breaks as she tells them the children were both found in the pool.

  He leans back in his seat and exhales loudly.

  “That’s terrible,” says Madison. “I’m sorry to make you relive this, but the more we know, the higher the chance of finding Jenny. Can you tell me about her? For instance, did she have a good relationship with your son? I’m sorry, I don’t know your son’s name.”

  “Jake. They seemed to love each other. They became fast friends and Jenny was always inviting herself over to our house. I didn’t really mind, as Jake had struggled to make friends up to that point. She was a nice girl, clearly intelligent and polite, but she was a little domineering. She’d boss Jake around. Sometimes things had a habit of going missing when she was around. I never said anything to Anna because I didn’t want to accuse Jenny and ruin our relationship, especially as it was just a few toys and books. And I could tell there was some tension between the two of them, so I didn’t want to make that any worse. But then things changed and… well, we had to move away.”