First Girl Gone(52)

“Finally, the man who’d lain with Sharon in the biblical sense climbs out the second-story window, scampers down a trellis, and hops an eight-foot privacy fence, managing to narrowly avoid your eyeballs in the process. So yeah. Big night at the Ritter house.”

She was quiet for a second.

“Am I forgetting anything?”

Charlie sighed. She’d have to talk to Allie or this could go on all night.

“The tattoo,” she said.

“Right. Good call. Lover boy has a Dark Mark or something similar inked on his inner arm. A skull and a vine or some snakes or something.”

Charlie drifted again as her sister finally went quiet. She inched out toward sleep, the room around her seeming to fade into the black nothingness of unconsciousness. Then Allie started at it again.

“We need to identify lover boy. Then we need to find out what Jason’s mixed up in, what that call was about. To me, those are two legitimate leads that need to be explored.”

“Agreed.”

“And poor Todd Ritter, seemingly oblivious to everything down in his toy chamber. He makes the trains run on time, I guess.”

“He’s ‘poor Todd Ritter’ now, huh? I thought you said all of this was partially his fault.”

Allie huffed.

“False. I said it’s partially his fault for not knowing what’s going on—not that I typically blame infidelity victims, mind you. But if you live the bulk of your adult life in a basement playroom… well, some of the not knowing is on you. In any case, toy obsession aside, he and Amber might be the only normal ones in the family from the looks of it. By comparison, anyway.”

“I guess I can agree with that,” Charlie said.

“The only one we didn’t get a good hard look at tonight was Amber’s biological dad. Theodore-dore-dore Spadafore-fore-fore.” Allie added a false echo to each name. “But you said his alibi was pretty rock-solid.”

They fell quiet for a beat, and then Charlie spoke.

“Isn’t it strange to get these glimpses into other families? To see how they really live? It’s like peeking behind the doors and windows of each home, you find a completely different world, foreign to your own. These families are nothing like ours, you know?”

“Yeah,” Allie said. “Definitely not.”

“If I think about it long enough, it makes me think that no ‘normal’ exists when it comes to families. There is no ideal. No right answer. Each one creates its own tangled web of relationships, too complex and sophisticated to be copied elsewhere.”

“That’s true,” Allie agreed. “Take the Dawkins family, for example. The parents seem utterly normal, utterly stable, and the daughter is the troubled one. Meanwhile, the Ritters are, to some degree, the opposite—the daughter is the normal one and the mom is the one breaking social norms; maybe the brother, too, I guess.”

Charlie rolled over. Stared up at the ceiling shrouded in darkness. Allie’s voice punctured the silence again.

“And after all of that, even a dysfunctional family like the Ritters can’t compare to our fractured family—broken forever.” Her sister sighed. “Or at least, they aren’t that way yet. Maybe it depends on what happens from here. With the girls, you know.”

Allie’s words hit Charlie like a punch in the gut. If she didn’t solve these cases, if she didn’t find the girls…

Immediately her brain whirred to life. Poring back over the facts, the files in her mind opening wide. She mentally dug through the information again.

She sat up. Reached for the nightstand. Opened the drawer. Inside, in a plastic baggie, she found what she was looking for.

She spun the Red Velvet Lounge matchbook in her fingers, the one she’d found in Amber’s room. It was the one thing she had that tied these two girls together. And she knew what she had to do next.





Chapter Thirty-Nine





The next morning, there was an email waiting in Charlie’s inbox from Ted Spadafore’s assistant. She’d attached Amber’s cell phone records for the past two months.

“I can’t believe he passed you off to an assistant,” Allie commented.

Charlie only shook her head, snatching up her computer and heading downstairs to the office to print out the call records. She took the warm pages from the printer tray and settled into her work, color-coding the numbers the same way she’d done with Kara’s calls. When that was finished, she compared the two lists, hoping to find a number in common between the girls.

After poring over the numbers for what seemed like hours, Charlie was forced to admit defeat. The call records didn’t share a single number in common.

Charlie shoved the pile of papers away in disgust. She was sick of dead ends. She wanted to feel like she was making progress for once. With that in mind, she got out her phone and called Will.

“I was just thinking about you,” he said, not bothering with hello. “I want to see you.”

She felt a thrill in her gut at that but forced herself to stay focused on the task at hand.

“Good. Because I have a favor to ask.”

“What kind of favor?” he asked.

“I need you to get me into the Red Velvet Lounge.”

“OK,” he said. No hesitation.