Her Silent Cry

Sixty-Eight

Josie faced off against Gideon Lendhardt. From across the interrogation table, he stared at her, his eyes flashing angrily. There was no guarantee that he’d talk to her, but he hadn’t asked for a lawyer yet either, so Josie had to take her chances.

“Gideon,” she said. “Whose idea was it to find Tessa and make her pay? Yours or Natalie’s?”

He didn’t speak.

Josie went on. “I’m guessing it was your lifelong dream to make her pay, but that Natalie was the one who came up with an actual plan. You two met in foster care, right? I understand you were nine when they took you away from your father for good. So you bounce around from home to home. One day you meet Natalie and the two of you become good friends. Maybe even lovers later in life?”

She could tell by the flare in his eyes that she had hit on something. “You understood each other, didn’t you? Both foster kids? Both kicked out of a system that couldn’t care less about you as soon as you turned eighteen. Then somehow you find Tessa. You realize she’s living in Pennsylvania with her husband and daughter. You want to get back at her, but you don’t know how. Natalie sees an opportunity not just to get back at her but to make a little money as well. Natalie took care of the logistics, didn’t she? The planning. What was in it for her? Just to make you happy? Or she wanted the money? I know she had a taste of money before you two carried this out. She hit the lottery. She knew she could get money out of Tessa’s new husband, didn’t she? All you two had to do was get to know little Lucy for a few months before the kidnapping, right? Earn her trust, become her friends. Promise her something irresistible—maybe taking her to a butterfly sanctuary or something. Well, Natalie probably came up with that. You just wanted to grab her, didn’t you?”

“It would have been a lot less trouble,” he said.

“Yes, I imagine it would have. Your plan was pretty elaborate. Especially the carousel. No cameras in the park, that was smart. Who gave Lucy the signal? Was it you or Natalie? It was you, wasn’t it? Natalie was at the Ross home leaving the teddy bear with your secret message, wasn’t she?”

“That was a streak of genius if you ask me,” he said, smiling. “I just wish I could have been there to see Tessa’s face when she heard it.”

Josie felt ill seeing the glee on his face, but she forged ahead. “Where did you take Lucy?”

“You think I’m going to tell you? You’re not so smart, are you? Kind of like Tessa.”

Josie let the barb go. “Well, I know you moved around a lot. Camped out in the woods. Stayed at the mill for a while. Also smart—to keep moving.”

He didn’t respond.

“Gideon, what did you do with Lucy?”

He still didn’t speak.

Josie said, “Lucy doesn’t deserve this, you know. She’s innocent.”

“So was I,” he muttered.

“Yes, you were. It must have been very traumatic, what happened to you.”

“You don’t know a goddamn thing,” he growled.

“I know that you were taken from your father when you were nine years old. I also know that your father told child services that Tessa had given you all those scars. But if that were the case, they wouldn’t have taken you from him, would they?”

He didn’t answer. A vein bulged in his forehead.

“They never reunited you with your father. All those years and they never sent you back to him. We can’t view your foster care file, but I’m guessing the reason they never sent you home is because you were violent, just like your father.”

“I’m nothing like that bastard,” he snarled.

“Well, you’re not like your mother,” Josie replied. “She’s gentle and kind.”

He pushed back in his chair a little, the legs screeching on the tile. “That’s an act.”

“How do you know?” Josie asked.

“Because any bitch who leaves her kid with someone like my father can’t be kind. Any bitch who abandons her child without so much as batting an eyelash is not gentle or kind. Whatever she said to you to make you believe that, it’s all an act.”

Josie softened her tone. “How old were you when she left? Do you even remember her?”

“I remember enough. I remember waking up hungry and looking for her, and she was gone. My father told me she left us. He said she didn’t love us. That she was a liar, and she wasn’t coming back for me. I waited. She never came back.”

“Your father put those marks on you,” Josie said. “Didn’t he?”

He dropped his gaze for a moment. “She might as well have. If she’d stayed, he would have taken his anger out on her, not me. She could have taken me with her, but she didn’t. She went on to live some great, fancy life and left me there in that shithole where my father beat the piss out of me for no other reason than I reminded him of her. The welts, cigarette burns, yeah, those are from him.”

“The others came from foster care?” Josie guessed.

“I wouldn’t have been in foster care if it weren’t for her. You don’t get it, do you? I was tortured. My life was an unending hell. All because she left me behind. She left me there, and she never looked back.”

Josie thought of one of the conversations she had had with Amy when she had told Amy she didn’t care if Amy had killed someone, she just wanted the truth. Amy had said, that’s not the worst thing. Because she had abandoned her own child, effectively sentencing him to a fate worse than death.

“How did you find her?” Josie asked. “How did you even know she was alive?”

“My dad. A couple of years ago, I went back to see him. I stayed away from him mostly after I aged out, but I found out from someone who used to live around us that he was sick, real sick. So I went to see him. The fight had gone out of him by then. He was harmless.”

“He had cancer,” Josie said.

“Bone cancer. Yeah. Real painful. He was at the end. I knew he was going to die, so I asked him about her. I wanted a picture. Something. We never had any photos of her or anything. It was almost like she had never existed, but I knew. I knew she had been there.”

“Did he have any answers for you?” Josie prompted.

“The same ones he always had. She was a lying bitch who abandoned us. I asked him if she was still alive. He said for years he thought she was dead, that’s why he never went looking for her. But then he was at chemo one day, flipping through magazines and stuff, and there was this newsletter thing one of those pharmacy reps had left, all about Quarmark and their groundbreaking new cancer drugs. He was interested in it because they had just released a drug that was supposed to stop bone cancer from spreading or stop bone mets or something. Stop cancer from metastasizing to bones—I don’t know. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t afford the stupid drug anyway. But in that newsletter was a story about the team at Quarmark. They’d had some big, fancy, expensive celebration in New York City, and one of the guys on the pricing team was in the photos.”

“And your father recognized your mother in the photo with him,” Josie filled in.

“Yeah. There she was, looking like some kind of supermodel while my dad was dying in the same shithole she’d left him in—and he was so broke at the end that the bank took everything. There wasn’t even anything left for me.”

“So you decided to go after her,” Josie said.

“I just wanted to mess with her, but then I found out she had a kid. Then I knew what I had to do.”

“Natalie helped you.”

“Yeah but then she lost it, said I wasn’t going along with the plan like we said. All she cared about was the money. I never cared about that. I wanted Tessa to suffer. Nat said I was ruining everything. Said I was too obsessed with Tessa, decided to take her out.”

“So you shot Natalie,” Josie said.

He didn’t answer.

Josie changed tactics. “Was that the only thing you disagreed about?”

“She got pissed when I changed the drop location. We had other places in mind—down by the river—but I changed it at the last minute. She didn’t like that.”

So the disagreement on the day they took Violet Young hadn’t been to do with Lucy. Still, that didn’t mean the little girl was still alive.

Josie felt the familiar roil of nausea in her stomach. “Gideon,” she said. “What did you do with Lucy?”