Ash
I lean back, resting my hands on my knees while Francesca continues to stroke the girl’s hair and speak reassuringly to her,
all while casting little worried looks in my direction.
“Meg?” Francesca is saying. “Meg, listen to me. You’re safe. No one can hurt you or your family. Did you hear what I said,
Meg? You’re safe.”
Except that she’s not, and she knows it. That’s why she’s clamped her mouth shut so tightly, refusing to say another word
about where she’s been, or with whom. And that’s also why she lets out another terrified scream when the doorbell rings a
few seconds later.
“Shhh,” Francesca says, stroking Meg’s arm. “That’s just my friend Jackie. She’s a police officer. I called and told her that
you were here—”
I throw her a startled look. A cop? Francesca called the cops? I thought she was calling an ambulance.
Meg apparently feels as betrayed as I do, since she tosses back the wolfskin, ready to run.
“There’s nothing to be frightened of,” Francesca insists. “Jackie’s an old friend. She’s bringing the EMTs. They’re going
to help you—”
But Meg has already scrambled up from the couch, upsetting the coffee mug.
“No!” she screams. “I don’t want to go to jail!”
“They’re coming to help you, Meg, not take you to jail.” Francesca’s voice is impressively calm considering that the girl
has flung herself at the sliding glass doors and is attempting to unlock them and flee, even as I’m getting up to go open
the front door and let this Jackie person inside.
Except that, when I get the door open, the person I see standing on the front porch isn’t the battle-axe in blue I’m expecting,
but a tall, attractive redhead wearing a sidearm, badge, and black tactical uniform.
“Well, hey there,” she says to me, a sunny smile on her freckled face. “Deputy Chief Jackie Boyle. Frankie Giovanni around?”
Behind her, I see not only two adolescent-looking uniformed EMTs, but an ambulance, two fire trucks, and multiple West Harbor
police cars, all parked along my side of the street. Somehow they managed to slide quietly into the neighborhood without me—or,
more importantly, Meg—knowing.
But everyone else on the street seems to know. All of my neighbors are standing on their lawns wearing curious and even worried
expressions as they watch the rescue workers milling around outside my front door
Great. Just great. Now I’m that guy on the street who has the cops show up at his house.
“Uh,” I say. “Come on in.”
Because what else am I going to do?
I step aside, and Francesca’s friend moves past me, still smiling as casually as if she’d run into us at the farmers market
and isn’t standing in my living room with a gun on her hip and about ten other equally heavily armed law enforcement officers
right outside the door.
“Hi, Jackie,” Francesca calls cheerfully from the sliding glass doors she’s physically restraining the hysterical girl from
unlocking. “This is Meg Boucher.”
“Well, hey, there, Meg,” Jackie says in the most upbeat tone imaginable.
It doesn’t work. Meg, now utterly terrified, breaks down.
“It was only beer and wine,” she wails from the floor where she’s crumpled. The two EMTs have followed Jackie, looking pretty
professional with their collapsible gurney and other gear. They’ve moved swiftly toward Meg and are now kneeling beside her,
trying to revive—and reassure—her.
“We only stole beer and wine,” Meg is insisting, weakly. “And a little food. I’m so sorry. We were so hungry. Please don’t
arrest me!”
“No one is here to arrest you, Meg,” Francesca explains patiently as the female EMT slips a blood pressure cuff over the girl’s
arm. “They’re here to help you.”
“That’s right.” Deputy Chief Boyle’s big, jovial voice exactly matches her big, jovial presence. “You have a lot of people
worried about you, little lady.”
Meg doesn’t look at all reassured. “I shouldn’t have come back here,” she murmurs, but this time without much conviction.
Her eyelids appear to be getting droopy. The EMTs have given her something. “I don’t know why I did.”
I do. She was looking for me. She doesn’t know it, any more than Emma did when she was here rooting through the fridge the other day. Sure, they were hungry.
But more than that, they wanted to be found. It’s the only explanation for why Meg returned to the scene of the crime—or chose my house in the first place.
“Dehydration,” one of the EMTs murmurs to the deputy chief as Meg’s head slumps forward. “And exposure.” She points to multiple
red welts on the back of the girl’s neck. “Mosquitoes. They’ve been sucking her dry. Between that, the abrasions, and the
malnutrition, I’m surprised she was walking.”
“And look at this.” The other EMT holds out the fading girl’s arm. Near where the blood pressure cuff is wrapped is a nasty
rash that I’m sincerely hoping Francesca didn’t inadvertently touch. “Poison ivy. It’s all over her.”
“Okay,” Deputy Chief Boyle says. Her tone isn’t so jovial anymore. It’s crisp and professional. “That’s enough. Let’s get
her to the ER. You—” I’m surprised to find her hazel-eyed gaze on me. She doesn’t look so jovial anymore. “Let’s talk outside.”
I nod and follow her out the front door. I know the drill. You can’t spend most of your free time finding lost things—especially
people—without running into questions from law enforcement every now and then. It’s never something I look forward to. Cops
generally aren’t too keen on “magic” as a defense for anything illegal that they happen to catch you doing.
It’s too soon to tell if Jackie Boyle is going to have a problem with me.
“So,” the deputy chief says when we reach my front porch. Francesca has followed us out but only to stand with her arms folded across her chest, staring back through my open front door at the EMTs, who are busy strapping Meg to their gurney. “This is your house, I take it?”
I nod again. It’s too complicated to tell her the whole truth. “Yes. I’m Ash Merit—”
I see the deputy chief’s eyes widen a little, almost as if she’s connecting my name with something she’s heard before.
Except what could she have heard? Unless Dr. Dick has been talking shit about me. Did he put something about me and the knotweed
in his vlog? I wouldn’t be surprised.
It can’t have been anything too bad, though, since the deputy chief is grinning broadly and stretching her right hand toward
me.
“Nice to meet you, Ash,” she says as she crushes my fingers in her surprisingly powerful grip. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Don’t believe it,” I say, and steal a glance at Francesca to see if she knows what slander her ex has been spreading about
me around town.
But she isn’t even paying attention. Her worried gaze is still on Meg, who is moaning on the wheeled gurney the EMTs are pushing
past us.
“Don’t ask her too many questions until she’s gotten some fluids into her,” she’s saying in a low tone to Jackie. “She’s already
exhibiting signs of post-traumatic stress.”
“Glad to hear it,” Jackie says mildly. “She should be stressed, after what she put her parents through.”
“We don’t know if that was purposeful. She may not have been held against her will, but she’s definitely been exploited and
manipulated, not only physically, but spiritually and emotionally, as well.”
The deputy chief looks unsympathetic. “Can you meet me at the hospital and evaluate her?”
Francesca frowns. “You know I’m not on staff there. That was Richard.”
“I know, I know. But you’ve already established a bit of rapport with her—”
“Can I come, too?” I ask, and both women turn their heads to stare at me, as if surprised I’m still standing there.
“You?” The deputy chief looks suspicious. “Why would you want to come?”
“To visit.” I can’t tell her that I have my own questions for the kid, and that they’re likely to be very different from hers.
“I feel responsible for her. She came to my house for help, after all.”
“She did, didn’t she?” Jackie is frowning thoughtfully. “Any idea why that might be?”
“No.” When you grow up in a family like mine, lying comes as naturally as breathing. But as my grandmother always says, Better to lie about magic than waste time trying to get nonbelievers to see the truth. “I just want to make sure she’s okay.”
“How generous of you.” The deputy chief continues to look suspicious. And why shouldn’t she? I come to town, and suddenly
girls who’ve been missing for months start showing up? I’d be suspicious, too. “I understand your home was broken into last
week, but you didn’t report it.”
I throw a reproachful glance at Francesca, but she doesn’t notice since she’s watching Meg get wheeled toward the ambulance.
“Yeah. But—”
“Relax.” Suddenly, Jackie shifts tactics. Now she’s grinning, trying to set me at ease. “I know you had a renter living here
at the time. Would have been helpful for us to know back when it happened, though. We might have been able to find this girl
before things got so bad for her.”
I don’t say what I want to in reply, which is, No, you wouldn’t. You haven’t even been looking for her.
Instead, I say, “Yeah, sorry about that.”
“You’re not going back to the city anytime soon, are you?” The deputy chief is pretending like she’s not warning me to stay
in town but that’s exactly what she’s doing. “Because I suspect I’m going to have some questions for you later.”
“No.” I glance at Francesca, but she’s still looking worriedly after the EMTs, who are loading Meg into the back of their
rig. “I’m not going anywhere.”
And with that, I’m dismissed by the deputy chief. She turns to Francesca and says, “I’m gonna follow the rig to the hospital.
On my way, I’ll call the Bouchers and let them know their daughter is safe.”
“Oh, good.” Francesca looks relieved. “Thanks for coming so quickly, Jackie. And so quietly. I was afraid if she heard sirens,
she’d try to bolt.”
She did try to bolt. But I get the feeling Meg is less scared of law enforcement than she is of Haley and her threats.
“No worries.” Jackie shrugs. “We were having a tactical response training session so it was easy to swing by.”
“Thanks, Jackie. I’ll walk you to your car.”
Francesca follows Jackie to her big, black SUV. Both women glance back at me several times as they walk, and once Jackie even
laughs at something Francesca says.
That’s okay, though. I don’t mind being laughed at. I have the feeling that my boss is going to be pleased about today’s turn
of events. No, I haven’t found Emma.
But I’m getting closer.
I’m back inside my house cleaning up the mess the EMTs left behind—there are discarded latex gloves all over the place—and trying to figure out how I’m going to get into Meg’s hospital room to question her when there’s another knock on my door.
I’ve already given my name and number to one of the officers. He and all other emergency personnel have left, so I can’t figure
out who could want something from me now. It seems a bit soon for the deputy chief to be back from the hospital already to
interrogate me about why this young woman chose my house, out of all the houses on the lake, to break into.
It isn’t until I open the door and see who’s standing out there on my porch, her arms folded across her chest, that I realize
Chief Deputy Boyle isn’t the only person in town who might want to question me today.
“So,” Francesca says. She’s changed out of the swimsuit and towel into a sweatshirt and leggings. “When were you planning
on telling me who you really are, and what you’re really doing here in West Harbor?”