The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(65)

“Just her?”

“She’s sick. Breast cancer. They found it early, at least. She and her wife were making plans to have a baby, so they both wanted to get fully checked out. They found the cancer, and treatments are going well. It’s still tough on her. I always wrote in whatever pen came to hand—”

“Black,” Mercedes and I say together.

“—but I thought the glitter would make her laugh.”

“Did it?”

“She loves it. She’s a child psychologist and trauma counselor, at least when she’s up for it these days. She keeps boxes of silly pens at work for her patients to use. And then Stanzi.”

“Is that short for something?” asks Cass.

“Constanze, like Lissi is short for Ivalisse. Only their abuelas call them by their full names, though. Stanzi was accidentally responsible for Faith’s only fistfight at school.”

“Faith got in a fight?” I ask, fascinated and appalled in equal measure. “I thought that was your specialty.”

“So did we. Mamá was so mad at me, thinking I must have taught her how to fight. She was just that angry, though. Our mamás grew up together on the island, ours, Stanzi’s, Lissi’s, and Rafi and Manny’s. Stanzi’s papá was black, and some of the kids at school were mean to her about it. Said she wasn’t black enough for the black kids, wasn’t Latina enough for the Latina kids. And Faith was so mad, she walked right up to the boy who’d been talking, told him Stanzi was perfect just as she was, and head-butted him right in the nose.”

We burst out laughing, and even Bran chuckles along with us.

“Stanzi’s in Orlando now. She’s an event manager at Disney, does a lot of the Make-A-Wish-type stuff on their end.”

All three girls grew into women who dedicated their lives to protecting and helping children. That says a lot about them, but also a lot about Faith, that she inspired that in them.

I set the picture of the four of them aside, keeping it separate just because it’s such a joyful picture, and start sifting through the others in the stack. Next to me, Bran goes through the Halloween photos with Mercedes and Cass. The girls were all Teenage Mutant Ninja Princess Ballerina Turtles, it turns out. Faith was Raphael, Lissi was Donatello, and Amanda was Michelangelo. Stanzi was supposed to be Leonardo, but she was home sick with chicken pox, after being unknowingly exposed to it at her birthday party.

It wasn’t a drop-off-your-kid-and-run kind of birthday party. In the pictures, parents are there to help, to play, to mediate, to grill, to stand off on the sides and talk to each other. This was a genuine neighborhood. Everyone’s smiling and laughing or bellowing at a kid doing something stupid and/or dangerous. But there’s something . . . there’s something that’s . . . huh.

“Cass?” I interrupt.

“Yeah.”

“Look at these.”

She gives me a strange look but takes the handful of photos while I reach for my tablet. “What am I . . . oh.”

“Right?”

“Oh.”

“What is it?” demands Bran.

Leaning over Cass’s shoulder, Mercedes frowns at the photos and points to the edge of one of them. “Who is this?”

“That’s . . .” He frowns, thinking back. “Mr. Davis? Mr. Davids? He lived a couple of streets over, I think.”

“Are any of these kids his?”

“No, his family died.”

“How?”

“I don’t know,” he says slowly, looking between us and the picture. “It was before he moved there.”

I spin my tablet around, one of the pictures from Friday filling the screen. “Am I just seeing things?”

Everyone studies the man on the screen.

“It’s hard to tell,” Cass says finally. “The picture from the party is too small.”

“He was passing out fliers on Friday. He was one of the volunteers. We stopped and spoke to him on the way to the school.”

“He was the nervous one,” Bran murmurs. “The one who looked at you and flinched.”

I skim through the rest of the stack of photos from the party, looking for one where he’s shown more clearly. Finally there’s one where he’s standing next to a grill, watching a group of kids shove each other at a picnic table covered in condiments. He looks sad, the way a basset hound always looks sad even when you know they’re happy. It’s something in the shape of the eyes, the way the skin pouches beneath them. He’s dressed neatly in slacks and a light windbreaker open over a polo shirt, medium-light brown hair cut tidily. He doesn’t stand out on his own.

“He’s looking at Faith in a lot of these pictures,” Mercedes points out, making her way through my discards. “At first I thought maybe he was watching the birthday girl, but it’s Faith. Look here. Stanzi is on the opposite side of the picture, but he’s looking at Faith.”

“Mark Davies,” Cass announces. I didn’t see her get her tablet out, but she has it in hand and open to her notes. “I talked to him a couple of hours after you did, I think. And look.” She turns her tablet around to show the picture she took that day, and yes, he’s the man I remember. He’s aged, certainly, enough that I might not connect the pictures to each other under other circumstances. His eyes, though . . . His eyes are what you recognize first. “He’s rented a house one street over and a couple lots down from the Mercers for the past year. He works from home, so we gave him extra attention to find out if he’d seen anything.”