First Girl Gone(45)
At last she stepped into the kitchen. Stainless-steel appliances. White shaker cabinets. Marble-look countertops. Mason jars wrapped in burlap and baker’s twine. A suburban cliché.
There were two doors on the back wall of the kitchen. One of them had to be for the basement stairwell.
“It’s definitely the left one,” Allie said.
Charlie chose the door on the right, twisting the handle and pulling the door free without a sound. The distinct smell of rotting produce wafted in her face, a wedge of light from the kitchen pendants illuminating a broom closet with a stainless-steel garbage can inside.
“Ha! Told you,” Allie said, her voice annoyingly smug.
Just as Charlie eased the closet door shut, she heard a chair scrape over the dining room floor. She had to hustle.
The next door revealed what she’d been looking for: carpeted stairs leading down. She could only see the first four steps before darkness blotted out everything beyond, but she could hear the telltale sound of a handful of silverware clattering on top of a plate. Whoever was clearing the table would probably enter the kitchen any second now.
Charlie stepped into the dim stairwell and shut the door behind her, sealing herself into the pitch-black space. She felt around on the wall for a light switch. There was a long beat after flicking it before the fluorescent lights below shivered to life.
Her shoes whispered over the carpeted stairs as she descended. She had been right about the basement rec room idea. A huge flat-screen was mounted in one corner with every video game console imaginable sitting in the entertainment center underneath. At least ten controllers cluttered the coffee table in front of yet another tufted leather sofa, this one the color of a Spanish peanut.
But the real centerpiece of the room was a huge train set. It dominated the basement, covering more than half of the floor space. It was set up in a large rectangular loop with a hinged section at one end that could be lifted out of the way like a drawbridge. A miniature village huddled at one end, with tiny buildings and roads. At the other end, there was a mountain with a tunnel and rolling hills flocked with some kind of green fiber to mimic grass.
Charlie bent closer, admiring the level of detail on the train depot, right down to the arrival and departure times posted behind the ticket window. She imagined how much fun she and Allie would have had with a giant playroom like this.
“Playroom? Are you kidding?” Allie said. “This is all Tahhhhd’s. Guarantee it. Look how fussy it is. How clean. Everything in its place. They probably don’t even let the kids down here at all.”
Charlie nestled the final camera behind a bundle of wires to one side, angled to stare out at the rest of the room.
At the top of the stairway, she turned off the lights and listened, holding her breath in the dark. When she was as confident as she could be that no one was outside the door, she went for it. Slipping out of the basement, she glanced around, finding the kitchen empty.
The door closed with a soft click, and just as Charlie’s fingers released the handle, she heard a noise behind her. The soft scuff of feet over tile. She turned and found Sharon Ritter staring at her from the kitchen doorway. Eyebrows scrunched. Lips pressed into a thin line.
“Sorry, I was looking for a bathroom?”
The woman’s face softened.
“I always say this house has too many doors,” she said and gestured over Charlie’s shoulder. “Go all the way through the dining room and there’s a powder room off the entryway.”
Charlie thanked her and ducked through the doorway she’d indicated. Entering the small bathroom off the foyer, Charlie was practically punched in the face by the overwhelming odor of pine. As she closed herself in, she spotted the can of Glade in a wicker basket on the back of the toilet.
“Sparkling Spruce,” Allie said, reading the label. “This family is obsessed with artificial smells.”
Charlie made a show of flushing the toilet and washing her hands.
“It’s almost as if they’re hiding something, you know?” Allie arched an eyebrow. “Air fresheners. Body spray. It’s like underneath the picture-perfect family, they know there’s something stanky they have to cover up.”
Charlie was eager to see what the cameras would show her. She hoped Frank was right, and that the secrets she found here would be the key to finding the girls.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Charlie lounged in her car across the street from the Ritter house, computer sitting open on her lap. Now, thanks to the nanny cams, she could get a deeper look inside the Ritter household—as close as someone could get to peeling off the roof and seeing the family secrets laid bare.
Her gut told her that something she found tonight would lead her to the girls, one way or another. Amber had gone missing first. Someone in the family had to know something. Had to.
Four miniature screens filled her monitor. Most were inactive at the moment, and the basement screen was pitch-black with the lights off. So far the only notable action had been a black-and-white cat sauntering through the master bedroom.
A light snow began to fall, peppering the windshield with random flakes. Charlie popped open a bag of Doritos and a Fresca and waited to watch the family in their natural habitat. They’d creep into their private areas sooner or later. In any case, it was better to have a snack with this kind of thing, she thought, or else the restlessness could wear your nerves down quickly. Even in a best-case scenario, a surveillance session like this was a tedious task. Lots of downtime. Lots of staring into a blank screen or watching nothing through binoculars. Food made it borderline tolerable.