“Yes.”
My knees weakened, and he guided me into a chair.
“A seven-year-old girl,” he said. “Her name was Lily Moreno. She disappeared from a church picnic six blocks from your mother’s house. We never found her.”
I remembered Lily.
Not her face, but the posters. Pink background. Missing front tooth. Braids tied with yellow ribbons.
I remembered my mother complaining about the search parties blocking traffic.
People act like children don’t wander off every day, she had said while stirring sugar into her tea.
I had told her that was a horrible thing to say.
She had looked at me and smiled.
Now Harris held up my phone.
“This message could be from Daniel. Or from someone connected to him.”
“Connected how?”
“We believe your mother’s shed may have been used as a transfer point.”
The phrase was clinical.
Transfer point.
As if children were boxes.
