Perry drove them back to the house on North Lake Shore Drive at five-thirty.
While Rachel showered and dressed to go out with her parents, she told Hannah to feel free to check out any of the house’s thirty-eight rooms—including a game room and a gym with a sauna in the basement, and a home movie theater on the third floor. Alida had gone home, but the cook, Hildie, was on duty tonight especially for her. So whatever Hannah wanted for dinner, Hildie would cook. Perry was spending the night in the servants’ quarters, so she didn’t have to worry about getting spooked in the big house. If she needed anything, all she had to do was pick up the house phone, and Perry or Hildie would take care of it for her.
Hannah remained in Rachel’s bedroom—and avoided Rachel’s parents—until they’d gone off to their family dinner. Then she started exploring. She felt funny checking out the rooms on the second and first floors. She didn’t even want to turn on the lights. She was afraid she’d break something. Though two other people were in the house, Hannah still felt like she was all alone. It was a creepy sensation. In some of the bigger rooms, her footsteps echoed.
The basement somehow seemed more accessible and welcoming than the rest of the house—like it was made for guests. And what could she break in the game room or the gym? The game room had a wet bar and a mini-kitchen with a fridge stocked with sodas, beer, and bottled waters. There was a ping-pong table, two pinball machines, an old player piano, and one of those flashy jukeboxes from the 1950s. Hannah poked her head into the mini-gym and checked out the dry sauna next door. It was cold right now, but she noticed a switch and a timer on the wall. Next door was a full bathroom with a Jacuzzi. Down the corridor she discovered an extra bedroom. It seemed like a guest room for not-so-special guests. The room was furnished with a pair of twin beds, a dresser, a desk and chair, and on the walls, framed vintage Illinois Central Railroad posters. But it was a room that could have been in anyone else’s basement. Hannah wondered if the furniture had belonged to Mr. Bonner before he’d married Mrs. Bonner and become rich. It dawned on her that it might even be Alden’s bedroom. But it looked too generic. Plus when she opened the desk and dresser drawers, they were empty.
Heading back upstairs, Hannah found the large, up-to-date kitchen—and the cook, Hildie, sitting at a built-in breakfast table. She was watching Wheel of Fortune on a TV bracketed to the wall and had a half-full tumbler of red wine in front of her. Hildie was a scrawny, wry-faced, beige-haired woman of about seventy. In a British accent that made Hannah feel like she’d walked into an episode of Downton Abbey, Hildie asked her what she wanted to eat for dinner.
Hannah figured a hamburger and fries wouldn’t be too much trouble. And she remembered to tell her to hold the mayo. By the time Hildie served up the dinner, she’d already polished off her wine and refilled the tumbler. Hannah could tell Hildie wasn’t exactly thrilled she had to work tonight, and maybe that was why she was a little tipsy. It was easy to get her talking, and Hannah found out that Alden’s room was in the servants’ quarters on the fourth floor. He shared a bathroom with Mr. and Mrs. Bonner’s chauffeur. Hannah was dying to check it out, but she didn’t dare ask.
She sat with Hildie at the breakfast table, and they muted the TV. She could tell she’d won her over because Hildie asked in a confidential whisper if she wanted some wine. Hannah took a Diet Coke instead. The hamburger was actually first-class restaurant quality. Hannah kept offering Hildie some of her fries while asking more about Alden.
She remembered what Rachel had told her about Alden’s mother coming over from Ireland, single with a baby, and taking a job as a maid in the Bonners’ house.
“Oh, she was a quiet, dreary little thing,” Hildie said in her crisp British accent, “and with this beautiful little boy. I had to wonder what the father must have looked like—the handsome scoundrel who’d left her in a family way without so much as a fare-thee-well . . .”
Hildie finally tried one of Hannah’s fries, and then she had a few more. “Anyway, the poor thing started getting sick about the time Alden was seven or eight—headaches and dizzy spells. He was so devoted to her, always helping her around the house with her chores. It was heartbreaking to see him realize she was slipping away. God bless the Bonners. Say what you will about them, they’re still very generous people. They paid her hospital and funeral bills—and made sure that boy had a home here. Of course, they knew there’d be hell to pay from little Miss Rachel if anything happened to her baby boy. We all adored him, but Rachel most of all. As kids, they were inseparable. In fact, the old housekeeper, Vivien Houghton—she was here before Alida—she thought it was an ‘unhealthy relationship.’”
“What did she mean by that?” Hannah asked.
Hildie helped herself to another French fry and then got to her feet. “I think Ms. Houghton caught them naked in Rachel’s bathroom on a couple of occasions, normal kid stuff.” She took a jug of Gallo wine out of the cupboard and refilled her tumbler. “The children were just playing doctor or some such thing. But Ms. Houghton was such a prude, her and her nightly novenas. Maybe she saw something else. I don’t know . . .”
Hannah left only a couple of bites of her hamburger before she pushed her plate away. “I wonder what she could have seen,” she murmured almost to herself.
“Well, if you want the whole story, you’d have to call on Vivien Houghton at Mary of the Rosary Rest Home.” Hildie raised her glass as if toasting her. “Ms. Houghton was working for Mrs. Bonner’s family even before Mr. Bonner came along. She knows about all the family skeletons . . .”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Sunday, September 20, 2:17 A.M.
Ellie studied the blurry photo on her phone: the body of Jane Marie Eggert, discarded in a leafy ravine under a bridge on Sycamore Way. It was a poor copy she’d bootlegged from the crime scene photo she’d found in the Tribune archives. But it made her recall details from the original picture: how from the waist down, Jane wore only pantyhose and one shoe, and the discoloration in her face after having been strangled.
From the front seat of Nate’s Ford Fiesta, she and Nate had an unobstructed view of the bridge. They’d parked a quarter of a block away—across from a small, deserted playground at the tip of some woods. The old, weathered stone bridge cut through the trees and led to a well-to-do residential neighborhood on Sycamore Way. The crossing was only three or four car-lengths long and about twenty feet above the creek running through the ravine.
Except for a few more trees, the site hadn’t changed much since 1970.
Ellie was convinced the copycat killer couldn’t resist returning to the “scene of the crime” tonight. If they were lucky, they’d catch him before he killed the “holy slut” he planned to dispose of in this spot.
Nate had brought along the revolver his brother’s partner, Frank, had given him. He’d admitted to Ellie that he’d never fired it. Right now, the gun was wedged between the car door and the driver’s seat.
Ellie switched off her phone. She didn’t want the illuminated screen to give them away. Nate had purposely parked as far as he could from the streetlights for their stakeout. Ellie had brought along a pair of binoculars.
Every time they spotted a pair of headlights from a car coming down Sycamore Way—in either direction—they both ducked down in the front seat and peered over the dashboard. But there was hardly any traffic this time of night. In three hours, only a dozen cars had passed by, the last one about forty-five minutes ago.
It occurred to Ellie that, just a couple of days ago, she couldn’t have imagined sitting alone in a car at two o’clock in the morning with this man—and not another soul in sight. Her assessment of “Nick Jensen” had turned around ninety-eight percent since finding out his real name was Nate Bergquist. Ellie believed his story—enough so she worried that Hannah’s and Eden’s relationship with Rachel Bonner might have endangered them; enough so that she wanted to help Nate; and enough so that she felt attracted to him. But there was that lingering two percent of unc
ertainty about Nate that made her cautious.
She glanced over her shoulder for any approaching vehicles and then turned to look at the bridge again. “Do you really think Hannah’s okay at the Bonners’ home tonight?” she asked.
“I doubt anything will happen to her while she’s there at the house,” he said. “Hell, it might even be the safest place for her right now.”
Ellie nodded. If the copycat killer was looking for a new victim tonight, Hannah was better off nowhere near the campus.
Her half-sister’s fate was still a mystery. Ellie was pretty certain that Eden had been abducted by the copycat, who, right now, could have her locked up in a shed somewhere. And there was always a chance that Eden was fine, exploring downtown Chicago nightlife this very minute. But after what Nate had told her about Kayla Kennedy, Ellie couldn’t help wondering if Eden had “disappeared” because she knew something about Rachel or her family—which meant she was probably dead.
“Speaking of Hannah,” Nate said. “I keep thinking about how useful she could be in getting us information about the Bonners—and Rachel.”
“The same way Kayla Kennedy was useful to you?” Ellie asked.
He nodded glumly. “I know. I’m worried about that, too. Hannah could already be in danger, and I don’t want to make it worse. But my brother, Gil, investigated Dylan O’Rourke and the Bonners shortly after they adopted Rachel. I’m pretty sure, much later on, Gil found out about Rachel’s affair with her dad’s business associate. I think what Gil knew—about the adoption or the affair or both—I think that got him killed. Hannah and Rachel are close right now. With a little coaxing, Hannah might get Rachel to open up to her, confide in her.”
“So you want Hannah to go undercover for you.”
“I guess so, only she can’t know she’s doing it for me. That would put her in more danger—along with the two of us.”
“Let me get this straight,” Ellie said. “You’d like me to manipulate Hannah into spying on Rachel for us without her really knowing why. And she can’t know about the risks involved either.”
He tipped his head back on the headrest and sighed. “Shit. When I thought of it earlier today, the whole scheme didn’t seem quite so horribly callous. But hearing you put it that way, hearing the reality of it . . . well, I’m sorry. Please, forget I said anything.”
Ellie saw a shadow sweep across the landscape in front of them. She looked over her shoulder and spotted the headlights of a car coming up Sycamore Way. “Duck!” she whispered.
They both slid down in their seats just moments before the approaching car’s headlights illuminated the inside of Nate’s Ford. Ellie heard the tires humming and the occasional pebble ricocheting against the underside of the car as it came closer. She listened to the car slow down. Then it passed. She and Nate peeked over the dashboard.
It was a black BMW. The headlights went off as the vehicle came to a stop in front of the bridge.
“Jesus, I think this is it,” Nate murmured.
The BMW sat there for a few moments. With the binoculars, Ellie tried to get a look inside the car, but it was too dark. All she could think was that the copycat killer could be in there, strangling his latest victim right now. “We can’t just sit here,” she whispered. “We have to do something.”
“Stay here,” Nate said. He grabbed the gun, opened the driver’s door, and crept out of the car. He quietly closed the door again, and the interior light went off. Ellie prayed the driver of the other car hadn’t noticed.
Gun in hand, Nate darted toward the idling BMW. Then he ducked behind a tree.
The BMW’s front door opened, and the inside light went on. Ellie gazed through the binoculars. The driver stepped out of the car. He was a gangly-looking teenager. He wore white high-top sneakers and had a mop of unruly brown hair. Ellie didn’t see anyone in the passenger seat or in the back.
The teenager glanced around nervously and then hurried around the front of the BMW to the passenger door. He opened it.
Nate skulked toward the kid, who was taking a black plastic bag from the passenger side of the car. From what Ellie could see, the boy didn’t look like a murderer. But then, some of the arsonists she’d helped put in prison hadn’t been much older than him. And anything could have been inside that plastic bag—from a dead girl’s clothes to a human head. He moved toward the side of the bridge with it.
Brandishing the revolver, Nate closed in on the unaware teen. “Hold it!” he yelled.
Ellie grabbed her phone and jumped out of the car.
Both Nate and the teenager were in some kind of wordless standoff. The kid looked absolutely petrified.
As Ellie got closer, she could see the boy was trembling. He gawked at her, and she knew from his fawn-in-the-headlights expressions that she and Nate had made a mistake.
“What have you got there?” Nate asked warily.
“Porn,” the kid answered—with a crack in his voice.
“What do you mean?”
“Playboy, Penthouse, a couple of copies of Hustler. It was my friend Steve’s father’s stash. He threw them out. So Stevie dug them out of the trash and had them for a while. He didn’t want them anymore, and since my folks were out of town, he gave them to me . . .” With a shaky hand, the teen reached into the bag and pulled out a Penthouse magazine.
Ellie shone her phone flashlight on the Vaseline-on-the-lens cover photo of a half-naked woman. The date along the top of the photo was July 1999. From how heavy the bag looked, the kid must have had about a dozen magazines.
Nate stashed the revolver in the pocket of his jacket. But the poor teenager seemed to crack under pressure. He wouldn’t stop talking.
“Anyway, my folks are coming home tomorrow, and I have no place to hide these. So I was going to dump them here. My parents would kill me if they find I have porn—especially my mom. They’re already monitoring my computer and my phone—”
“Okay, okay,” Nate gently interrupted. “I get the picture. Why didn’t you just toss them in a Dumpster?”
“I was afraid somebody might see me.”
“Yeah, well, throwing them away this close to a playground, where a bunch of little kids hang out, that’s not such a great idea either,” Nate remarked.
“I never thought about that,” the kid mumbled. “What are you guys going to do to me? Was that gun real?”
“No, don’t worry about it,” Nate replied.
“It’s okay,” Ellie said. “Relax. We thought you were someone else.”
“Do you want us to take the magazines?” Nate offered. “We can throw them out for you. No one will ever trace them back to you.”
“You’d do that?”
“Sure, don’t sweat it,” Nate said.
The teenager handed the bulky black plastic bag to him. “Well, thanks,” he stammered. “Thanks a lot, man.” Then he hurried back toward his parents’ BMW, hopped inside, gunned the engine, and peeled away.
Nate stood there for a moment with the lumpy-looking bag in his grasp. “Poor kid, I think we scared the shit out of him.” He chuckled. “You want to hear the funny part? I remember that issue of Penthouse. My brother had it. I’ll bet I’ve seen at least half the magazines in here.”
They turned and started walking back to Nate’s car. “So, are you really going to get rid of those magazines, or are you keeping them?” Ellie asked.
“Well, as tempted as I am to take a trip down mammary lane, after hearing the list of previous owners, there’s not enough hand sanitizer in the world.” When they reached the Fiesta, Nate opened the trunk and set the bag inside. “Don’t forget to remind me we have these back here. First Dumpster we see . . .” He shut the trunk and glanced at his wristwatch. “It’s a quarter to three. Do you want to call it a night?”
Ellie hesitated. The smile faded from her face. She thought about how Jane Marie Eggert was last seen in a local tavern fifty years ago tonight. The bars in the vicinity usually closed at two in the morning. “Could we give it a
nother half hour—just to be sure?” she asked.
He opened her door for her. “It’s fine with me. I like the company.”
She climbed into the car. “Thanks, me too,” she murmured.
Nate shut the door for her, and then went around to the driver’s side. He got behind the wheel. They both sat there in the dark for a moment.
Ellie finally sighed. “Give me some time. I’ll try to figure out how to get Hannah to help us without putting her in too much danger.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Sunday, 2:46 A.M.
Seventeen blocks from the bridge on Sycamore Way, a junior named Justine Everly was leaving a party at one of the upperclassmen resident houses. The redbrick estate was home to thirty-two young men—and the only one of them to show any interest in her was a nerdy business major named Darrell. He was nice enough, but boring. Plus he just seemed so utterly desperate. All the hot guys there were taken. It was one of the pitfalls of attending a school where the girls outnumbered the guys four to one.
Justine realized as soon as she stepped outside that she’d had too much to drink. But the large consumption of alcohol had failed to make Darrell seem any more attractive. So at the door, when he offered to walk her home, she insisted that she was fine.
But she wasn’t. She walked away frustrated and disappointed.
So far, after only two weeks, her junior year at Our Lady of the Cove was a major bust. She hated all her classes. Also, due to a housing shortage, they’d stuck her in Campbell Hall with a bunch of freshmen and sophomores. And just to rub it in, her pretty blond sophomore roommate, Stephanie, had a cute steady boyfriend at Illinois State, and Stephanie had plastered pictures of them on the wall all over her side of the dorm room. At least she’d be spending most of her weekends with him in Normal, which was sort of a break for Justine.
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