Chapters (48)
- also by patricia cornwell
- title page
- copyright
- dedication
- contents
- prologue
- one
- two
- three
- four
- five
- six
- seven
- eight
- nine
- ten
- eleven
- twelve
- thirteen
- fourteen
- fifteen
- sixteen
- seventeen
- eighteen
- nineteen
- twenty
- twenty-one
- twenty-two
- twenty-three
- twenty-four
- twenty-five
- twenty-six
- twenty-seven
- twenty-eight
- twenty-nine
- thirty
- thirty-one
- thirty-two
- thirty-three
- thirty-four
- thirty-five
- thirty-six
- thirty-seven
- thirty-eight
- thirty-nine
- forty
- two nights later
- credits
“Good God, what a shame. Oh, Lord,” she says. “Dear God. How awful. Well, I thought it was the spring, and I’m right. This is terribly upsetting. When the residents know, they’ll be heartbroken. She was so popular, had been helping out here for many years.”
The last time Peggy Stanton was here was the night she vanished, April twenty-seventh, a Friday, when she ate dinner with a group she was working with, a collage that night, the residential administrator explains.
“It was a true passion with her,” she says. “Teaching arts and crafts, working with your hands. Peggy was just very involved in improving self-esteem, reducing anxiety and depression in seniors, and when you actually shape something with your bare hands and watch it evolve into a work of art? There just isn’t better therapy,” she adds, and she describes Peggy Stanton as a fine woman shattered by personal devastation, by unimaginable loss.
“She had a healing touch, you might say. Maybe because of what she’d been through in her own life. She was just starting the residents on pottery,” she explains. “But then she didn’t come back.”
She assumed Peggy Stanton had gone to Florida, perhaps to her lake cottage in the Chicago area.
“I wasn’t concerned, just a bit disappointed, as we’d been investigating kilns,” she says, and I think of Peggy Stanton’s basement, of work recently done and of the unusual tools on the table down there.
Not for baking but for pottery, and I ask her if Peggy Stanton might have been thinking about installing a kiln in the basement of her home and if she might have hired Howard Roth on occasion to do an odd job or two. Very possibly, she says, but she can’t be sure, and she offers to give me a tour of Fayth House.
“I’ve held you up enough,” I reply, and I thank her as a chime sounds on my phone.
A text message from Lucy.
Who is Jasmine? I read, as I’m leaving.
Mildred Lott’s missing dog that turned up later, I text her back in the dark, returning to my SUV, which is next to another SUV that wasn’t parked there earlier.
A silver Jeep Cherokee with a silver mesh grille right next to me when the whole damn parking lot is practically empty, and I get an eerie feeling, a sensation that flutters.
Missing??? Then why’s she outside at night calling it?
About to get in the car & will call, I reply.
The silver Jeep Cherokee that passed me a little while ago when I first got here, it occurs to me. The same one I saw earlier in my own parking lot or one just like it. I point my key to unlock my SUV while part of me wants to run, and another text chimes.
Jasmine! Jasmine! Where are you? Come!
thirty-nine
thirty-nine
I’VE BEEN TAKEN BY PIRATES.