Not sure I had remembered to feed the dogs their evening meal, I dumped food into their empty bowls. They didn’t seem very excited about it, but then I wouldn’t be excited about dog food either. I set the coffeemaker, locked up the house and went to my room. Lying curled up in my bed, the TV remote in one hand, I flipped between FOX, CNN and David Letterman and I thought about all I had learned tonight. About the case, about my daughter and my niece, about Jim, and about myself. It was flattering to have a younger man interested in me. Flattering, yet painful.

  I knew what time and good eating was doing to my body. I had seen the cellulite starting, the sagging arms and flabby thighs, the little tire around my middle. I wasn’t fat, but I was no skinny, svelte swimsuit model either. Before Jack had died, I’d had a good body image. But finding that he’d conducted a many-years-long affair with a woman taller, thinner and more willowy than I had put a big dent in my self-confidence. The idea of Jim seeing me naked was more painful than exciting.

  Lovely bedtime thoughts. I tried to concentrate on Letterman’s Top Ten list, and fell asleep with the TV on and the remote in my hand. I woke when Jas raced down the hall, feet thumping, and jumped onto the bed. “Wake up, Mama. You have so got to see this!”

  I looked blearily up at my daughter as I clicked the TV off. “Not at nearly 2:00 a.m., I don’t. Go away and go to sleep.”

  Jas threw the covers off me, grabbed a wrist and pulled me to the edge of the bed. “Jasmine Leah Davenport, you stop that right now!” When she tugged me half off the bed, I shrieked, “Stop it! Jasmine!”

  “Get up, Mama. I think we found those dead girls.” She was serious, her face set, her eyes sparkling with a mixture of horror and excitement. “They’re on the Internet.”

  That woke me up in a hurry. I pushed her away and straightened myself in the bed before rolling off the side to the floor. “Okay. Let’s see it.” I followed her to the rec room and found that Paz and she had changed into flannel pj’s and made a nest for themselves on the big couch. The room smelled of popcorn, the food of choice for late nights.

  I crawled next to Paz in the center of the blankets, tossed a handful of popcorn into my mouth and rubbed my dry eyes. “Okay,” I said around the mouthful, “this better be good.”

  Paz turned the laptop to me as Jasmine settled against my other side. Any thought of sleep fled at the sight. It was the opening page to a site, the graphics and art featuring a Grecian temple and a statue of Zeus. The photography was grainy, as if the designer had used pictures with too few pixels.

  “We should be the cops,” Paz said. “This stuff only took a couple hours to find. Why haven’t the cops found it yet?” She hit a key and the home page disappeared to reveal a woman in Grecian clothing, an off-the-shoulder gown that puddled around her feet. She held a flute in delicate fingers. Her face had been cut out, leaving a black silhouette where her head should have been.

  Below her picture was the word Mnemosyne. Below that was a poem, the first line reading, “Mnemosyne, my life, my love, the woman who was my home. Dead thou art and ever shall be, till the underworld thou dost roam.”

  “The poetry sucks,” Paz said, and I had to agree, not bothering to read on.

  Paz scrolled down and stopped on the image of a young girl, standing beside a huge Grecian urn, the kind that transported oil on sea voyages. She was dressed like the older woman but held a lyre in one hand, a flute in the other and a rolled parchment in the crook of her arm. Her smile was tender. A stylized black ribbon had been added at the top of the picture, the ends trailing down around the photo like a border or a frame. Below the photo was the single phrase, “My Muse.” I looked at my two girls, one on each side. “So?”

  Paz gave me a triumphant look and hit another key, revealing another photo of the girl in the off-the-shoulder gown. This time she was sitting in a thronelike carved chair before a backdrop of the Mediterranean Sea, holding dancing slippers and a lyre. Below her photo was the single word, Terpsichore, and below that, a poem that began, “Terpsichore, joy and dance, siren of the stage…” The slippers were pointe shoes. Chills that had nothing to do with the room slid down my back.

  “It’s them, isn’t it?” Jasmine asked.

  I pulled the laptop closer and studied the photograph. “Go back to the first page,” I said. Paz hit a key and I memorized the child’s face. “Back to the second one.” The face was narrower, the lips thinner. The expression sadder. It wasn’t the same girl. But I had seen her before, and recently. On the wall of photos in the FBI office.

  “There’s more,” Jasmine said. Paz hit a key and the page changed again. The photograph on this page was a child, standing, the dress longer or the girl shorter than in the previous standing shot. But the backdrop was the exact same as the sitting child, the Mediterranean Sea, suggesting a wall-size photograph or a background added afterward. This child wore her hair upswept in a loose chignon, earrings at her ears. There was fear in the tightness of her features, her haunted eyes. At her feet was what looked like the scroll from the original photo of the older woman. In one hand she held something. It was hard to tell in the poor quality photo, but I was pretty sure I had seen it before. A wax tablet and a stylus.

  I was breathing hard, too fast, feeling the tingling in fingers and toes, the result of stress and hyperventilation. I leaned in, studying the photo. The earrings looked like knots, and she wore a bracelet. The word Calliope was beneath the photo, followed by another bad piece of poetry that began “Calliope, beautiful voice, arbitress in the argument…”

  “Back and forth,” I said, waffling my fingers. The pages went back to the home page and slowly forward. Each girl wore a bracelet. “Two girls,” I breathed.

  “Five,” Jas said softly.

  Paz hit more keys and the first photo came up. “My Muse,” she said and hit a key. “Calliope.” She hit another key. “Terpsichore.” Hit a key. “Euterpe.” Key. “And Clio.”

  “Five girls,” Jasmine said.

  “I have to call Jim.”

  Jasmine put her cell phone in my hand. My mind went blank. As if she understood, Jasmine shoved out of the entwining blankets and raced from the room and back, depositing my cell in my hand and jumping back onto the forgiving couch.

  With nerveless fingers I hit speed dial, ignoring my girls’ shared glances. He answered, sounding awake, though tired. “Ramsey.”

  “Sorry to call you so late,” I said, “but you need to get on the Net.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Jasmine and Topaz found a site with the missing girls on it.” Jas and Paz leaned in and I tilted the phone so they could hear. “Three of your original girls, not counting Mari, and two new ones.”

  I heard the sound of a body rising and springs protesting. “You’re sure?” I heard buttons being snapped and a chair scooted across a hard surface. Microsoft’s signature music floated over the airwaves.

  “Yes. I’m sure. Go to www.myvisionquest.net. No spaces, no dashes.”

  A moment later, Jim said, “Ah, hell. Ah, hell.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought. You said something about poetry. How about, ‘Terpsichore, joy and dance, siren of the stage. Pirouette, gavotte, ballet, lyre and song, the gods will rage. War and death and dance and sway…’ It just gets worse.”

  “How did they find this? How did they find something with information only the cops have seen?”

  “They’re children of the electronic age. And they’re nosy.”

  The girls bumped fists and shared a grin. “We’re the best,” Paz whispered.

  A long pause followed before Jim spoke. “I gotta go to the office. If I can find a way to keep you and the girls out of it, I will. Otherwise, a cruiser will be at your door to escort you in.”

  I felt myself flush. “You’d have us brought in for finding a site with the missing girls on it?”

  “Not me. Simmons. Her first thought will be that you set up the site, kidnapped the girls and were manipulating us the whole time.”

  Jas took the phone right out of my hand and said, “That’s the last help you getting from me and mine, cop.” I pawed the air trying to get the phone back but Paz got it instead.

  “Yeah. You screwed with the wrong family. Screw you.” She closed the phone with a hard snap. “That’s the last time I help the cops solve a murder case,” Paz said. “Can you believe that?”

  I clenched my fists, closed my eyes and sighed, the sound long-suffering and weary.

  “We should just switch to criminal justice and become cops. Show them boys how to do it right,” Jas said.

  “Huhn. I got no use for a system that assumes people are guilty instead of innocent. That’s against the Constitution,” Paz said.

  “The court system assumes people are innocent until proven guilty,” I said, my eyes closed. “And, on paper, law enforcement does, too. But the reality is that cops work from a different perspective. Everyone is guilty. All the time.”

  “We’re not guilty,” Jas said, her tone stubborn. “You let that Emma come after us. Nana and Aunt Mosetta will have her job. Probably have her stuck somewhere like Guantanamo Bay, get her tortured or something.”

  I wanted to laugh at the thought of Emma and Nana butting heads. Nana had the harder head and the bigger friends, but Bow-tie Emma had a gun. Opening my eyes, I said, “Let’s see it again.” We went through the site, studying the photos of the girls. “The cops will find who made this Web site and bring him in,” I said. “You girls did a good thing.”

  “Not gonna be so easy,” Paz said.

  I looked at her in surprise.

  “I looked at the HTML code. It’s a basic site design, with really primitive coding. Anyone could have designed it. So I went to Whois, thinking it would be just as basic, you know, listing all the Web site info.”

  “Who is? Topaz, you are light years ahead of me on Internet stuff.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m supposed to be,” she said knowingly. She was majoring in computer studies or whatever they called it these days.

  “Whois is a Web site that tracks all the owner’s and site’s info, if you know how to get in and use it. I do. The designer, administrator, hosting site—everything—is anonymous, listed as corporations in different parts of the world. The only address is in Thailand.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “So the Web site is basic but the way it’s set up is intricate.”

  “Juicy. Really juicy.”

  I figured that meant she was agreeing with me. “Maybe the guy paid someone else to set up the site and get it registered, then he took it over and built the site himself.”

  “Maybe. He can upload new pages from anywhere. All he needs is a laptop and any open Wi-Fi. He can drive around any town and look for a Wi-Fi connection, log on and shoot an upload to the site.” At my blank look, she said, “Trust me. This guy’s invisible. He could live two blocks over and we’d never be able to trace him. And he can work the site from anywhere.”

  I sighed and rubbed my eyes. “Okay, girls. Tomorrow—today—is a school day. Go upstairs and get some sleep. And leave the laptop in the rec room. I mean it. No more of this tonight.”

  “When this case is over, I’m writing a paper on it,” Paz said with satisfaction. “And I’ll get an A.”

  Back in my bed, I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling. Moonlight filtered through the blinds and curtains, throwing whispery shadows above me, shadows that moved with the bushes beyond the windows, as they were stirred by the night wind. It was soothing, comforting, like the mattress beneath me, and the soft sheets and blankets.

  The Web site Topaz had discovered was connected directly to the case and the kidnapper. The man in jail for kidnapping and Mari were not connected to either. That meant that the police still had pertinent missing persons reports on four girls, including the one who had been found beneath the Confederate Monument. Which meant that they had two unaccounted for. Two more children taken by this monster and probably already killed. Tears filled my eyes and I rolled over and closed them, hoping sleep would come and that there would be no further interruptions in the night.

  20

  Friday Morning

  K nocking woke me. I stumbled to the back door to find Nana standing there with a shovel in one hand, a pair of gloves in the other, and dressed in bib overalls. She scowled at my state of dishabille, and said, “I’ve been up and working for over five hours. You still in bed?”

  I yawned and leaned into the doorjamb, smelling flowers, coffee, clean-turned earth and dog. Big Dog bumped my hip, long-haired tail wagging. The coffee scent was from behind me and I glanced over at the ancient Mr. Coffee. “We were up till two-something solving murders. Want to hear about it over coffee?”

  “What I want is someone to watch the wetbacks in the field on Tyler Road,” she said, propping the shovel and following me inside. “They do okay on the hay yesterday?”

  “You don’t hire illegal aliens, Nana, and wetback is not PC. They did fine.” I poured two mugs and passed her one. Nana drank it black—“Straight up, just the way I like my whiskey,” as she put it. I added both cream and sugar to mine—a lot of each—and poured a bowl of Special K.

  “Spill it. I don’t have all day,” Nana said, sitting at my breakfast table. “You gonna take the haying or do I have to do it all by myself?”

  I sat beside her and propped my feet on the chair opposite. “You want to gripe a bit more first, get it all out of your system? Make yourself sound a bit more martyred?”

  Nana glared at me and I smiled sweetly. She chuckled under her breath and took a loud sip of the too-hot coffee. She cut her eyes to me. “Not many of mine would say something like that to my face.”

  “I used to be scared of you, too, but I’m not anymore. I’ll take the haying until two. I have to be at the hospital at four this afternoon.”

  “Better than nothing. I’ll stick one of Mosetta’s youngsters over it after school. I got to train one or two of them up to be foremen. I’m getting old, need to be prepared to turn the farm over to the next generation.”

  I didn’t reply. Nana had said the same thing for decades. The next generation was now in their sixties. Mine were in their forties and early fifties. The generation who might be interested in farming were the greenies, still in public school, learning about the waste of land, erosion and global warming. Instead, I told her about the Web site and about waking Jim at a bit before two. Nana frowned when I repeated Jim’s reactions to her. “He hasn’t called me back, so I don’t know if it panned out or not.”

  “If it does, and if he wasn’t able to keep the girls’ names out of it, this family will be in the police spotlight again.” Nana drained her cup and stood. “You tell me if I need to do something.” Which sounded vaguely ominous. She set down her cup and headed for the door, adding, “That possum is three feet under. You owe a tip to Mosetta’s Thomas Spires. He’s twelve.” The door closed behind her.

  That was when I realized I hadn’t had to disarm the alarm system when I’d opened the door. I looked at the door, pretty sure it had been unlocked. I took in the girls’ vehicles parked behind the house and heard giggling and a monotonous bass from upstairs. There were no breakfast dishes out, so Jas hadn’t been down yet. Jas always ate first thing when she came down the stairs. And yet the door was unlocked.

  I stepped to the bottom of the stairs and called up. “Jas? Paz?”

  The music went silent and both girls stuck heads out of opposite rooms to look down at me. “Sorry about the music, Mama,” Jas said.

  “No problem with the music. Have either of you been down here yet this morning?” Two heads shook no. “Did either of you go out last night after I went to bed the first time?” Two more head shakes. “Okay. Don’t be late. I’ll put cereal bowls out for you.”

  “What’s the matter, Mama?” Jas asked.

  “Nothing. I guess I didn’t set the alarm.”

  “You set it. I looked when we went up last night. The little red light was on.”

  Apprehension waltzed its way along my spine. “Oh. Thanks.” I turned away before she could see my expression. Jas could read me far better than I could read her these days.

  I stared at the green light on the alarm pad. Someone had unlocked the door and turned off the alarm without waking us, which meant that I had slept through the soft warning tone that had sounded. It meant that someone had been inside the house during the evening and had turned off the alarm before leaving. Or someone was still here.

  I raced to my room and grabbed the little gun off the top closet shelf, then changed my mind and took the shotgun instead. On instinct, I broke open the weapon and checked the load, brass shells shining in the closet light. I still hadn’t cleaned the guns since the police had confiscated and returned them. With a snap, I closed the breach, which effectively cocked both barrels, and thumbed off the safety, set the stock firmly against my shoulder, ready to fire.

  Methodically, I went from room to room, checking the house. There was no one here. But in the small room off the rec room, the small space that still stored Jack’s business papers, building and development plans, a small section of floor had been cleared, papers pushed to the side and the carpet beneath exposed. Someone had sat here.

  Fear gripped me hard. Someone had been in my house. Last night. While the girls had studied and played here? Or later, after we’d gone to bed, a quick in and out? I couldn’t be sure.

  I backed out of the room and called a locksmith, paying extra to get the husband-and-wife team out today to change all the locks. I called UR Safe With Us, the company that handled our security system, and had them check the automatic security log. What I discovered terrified me. Someone had disabled the alarm system at 3:00 a.m.. Had we shared our evening with someone? If so, they knew everything we did. Everything we had told the cops. Or had someone entered at 3:00 a.m. and left before I’d woken, without resetting the alarm?