“Mom has to say we’ve failed because she feels she has,” I reply. “She never had a chance to do any of the things we can, and maybe she questions what her purpose on this earth has been. If so, that’s not a good way to feel when you’re almost eighty years old.”

“Well look.” Dorothy throws back the whiskey as if she needs courage, which she doesn’t. “We’re the only sisters we’ve got, right? So we’re in this together, and mainly I wanted to make sure you’re okay with Pete and me.”

“I don’t really know much about Pete and you,” I reply as I feel indignant inside when I have no right to feel that.

“It’s the real thing, and one favor you could do me is make it sound like I did something helpful at least in catching that monster. What’s her name? Carrie Gretchen.”

“Grethen. And you were helpful,” I reply, and it’s true but not the way my sister would have intended.

She was helpful because she single-handedly brought Carrie to my door. It was Dorothy who began answering Facebook postings from someone who claimed to be a childhood friend from our early days in Miami. My sister bought into Carrie’s traps hook, line and sinker, and began a correspondence that supplied more information to Carrie than she already had.

Dorothy happily volunteered nasty nicknames, and that my father had recorded a radio commercial for his small grocery store. Carrie must have gotten her hands on it or maybe Theo Portison did. There’s nothing good to come of my rubbing it in that Dorothy engaged in a long conversation with a perfect stranger on a flight, and then invited this person to my house and almost got all of us killed and Desi abducted. Dorothy is no match for Carrie’s machinations.

But then none of us really are or it wouldn’t have taken this many years and destroyed lives to catch her.

CHAPTER 47

A MINUTE PLEASE TO WASH my face and grab my robe.” I walk away from the bed, heading to the bathroom. “Then we’ll get Tesla and Sock downstairs and you can help me in the kitchen. What’s Desi doing? Is he up yet?” I call out to Dorothy.

“He slept with Janet,” I hear her say. “I think they’re getting started on brunch. They wanted to surprise you by helping.”

I smell sausage cooking. And Desi’s quite the meat-eater in our midst, he and Marino.

“Why did she want him, Kay? Why would anyone go to such lengths to kidnap a nine-year-old child?”

I stop outside the bathroom door and look at her, wondering if she’s serious, and sadly she is. “People have gone to much more extreme lengths than Carrie did,” I reply, and my sister doesn’t want to know some of the horrors I’ve seen.