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She opened her laptop, ready to spend another obnoxious chunk of time reading about the Margolis family, Sandy Stamos’s death, and the mysterious hit-and-run case from 1995. But before she got the chance, her phone buzzed with a reply text from James.
Sloan,
As an admin of the site, I have access to users’ personal information. But I could lose my job if I shared it with you. Also, IMO showing up on your aunt’s doorstep and announcing that your DNA profile matches that of her missing niece sounds like a really bad idea.
Sloan typed back.
Oh, James, that ship has sailed. If you can’t give me her address, is there another way for me to get in touch with her?
The reply was instant.
Yes, you can direct message her through the site.
Sloan stared at her phone and thought again about her birth parents. She picked up one of the printed pages that rested on her kitchen table. It was of Preston and Annabelle Margolis from the cover of a tabloid. It was difficult to imagine them as her biological parents since Annabelle Margolis was younger in the photo than Sloan’s present age. Still, the sight of that young couple touched her heart. She felt sorry for Preston and Annabelle Margolis, whose two-month-old daughter had been taken from them and sold off through the adoption black market. God only knew what had happened to them.
Sloan looked back at her phone and typed a short reply to James.
Thanks.
With a new sense of resolve and responsibility, she turned back to her laptop and pulled up her Your Lineage profile page. Before she had the opportunity to access the family tree that James had created and find Nora Margolis’s profile, Sloan noticed a red circle at the top right of the screen indicating that another user had messaged her.
An eerie feeling sent her stomach into free fall. She looked around her dark apartment and took a moment to shake the sensation that she was not alone. Finally, she clicked on the message.
Dear Sloan,
My name is Nora Margolis and I’m taking a chance here . . .
I see that your profile matched to my husband, Ellis, indicating that you’re his biological niece. Such a strange question, but in light of the news that law enforcement delivered to us just a couple of days ago . . . are you Charlotte?
—Nora
Sloan’s DNA profile was public. It was the only way James could set up the account to see if she matched to other users. Nora Margolis would have been informed about the connection, as the website called it, when Sloan’s DNA profile matched to the Margolis family. It was likely the only hit Nora Margolis had received in the last week. And after the FBI informed the family that Charlotte Margolis had been found, it wouldn’t take a seasoned detective to figure out how it happened, just an aggressive user of online ancestry sites, which Nora Margolis was.
Sloan stared at the message for several minutes. Where this situation was headed, she had no idea. She only knew that a mounting sense of duty was bubbling up inside of her, one that called her to look into what happened to her birth parents all those years ago.
She dug Eric Stamos’s card from her purse and fired off a quick text.
Eric, it’s Sloan Hastings. I think I found a way into the Margolis family.
CHAPTER 19
Raleigh, North Carolina Sunday July 21, 2024
SLOAN SPENT HER SUNDAY AT THE LIBRARY SHE RESERVED A PRIVATE, glass-walled room tucked in the corner behind rows of books where no one would bother her. On the table in front of her was her research—pages and pages of archived newspaper articles, magazine pieces, and photographs she had pulled from the library’s microfilm covering the 1995 disappearance of Preston and Annabelle Margolis, and their infant daughter, Charlotte. Every major newspaper in the country covered the story. Not just with one-and-done mentions, but ongoing features about the suspicious circumstances that shrouded the family’s disappearance. As the investigation dragged on and no suspects were named, the news stories evolved from foul play to the theory that the Margolis family had disappeared of their own accord. Specifically, that Annabelle Margolis, because she was a person of interest in the hit-and-run death of a local Cedar Creek man at the time of her disappearance, had packed up her family and vanished to avoid prosecution.
Sloan had dug as deeply as she could on the hit-and-run, but there were scant details about the case. She’d need to rely on Eric Stamos on that front. She shifted her focus to the Margolis family. Her laptop sat in the middle of the paper stacks displaying several websites that detailed the history of Cedar Creek, the Margolis family, and their reign of power over Harrison County, Nevada, for the past century. When her DNA profile first came back, she had taken a shallow plunge into the details of the family with James the genealogist. Today, Sloan was diving deep.
Hours of digging had painted an elaborate picture of the Margolis empire. Family members occupied several seats on the county board, controlled the District Attorney’s Office, and made up the largest personal injury law firm in the county, aptly named Margolis & Margolis. The biggest employer in Harrison County was Margolis Timber, a logging company that provided lumber to most of the West Coast. A review of county records told Sloan that much of the land and many of the town’s buildings were owned by Margolis Realty, LLC. The family was the very definition of a monopoly. They had taken a sleepy town tucked in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and made it their own. Hell, the family even owned and operated their own winery—Margolis Manor—located in Oregon, which produced wines that were distributed around the world. With a family as powerful, affluent, and well known as the Margolises, it was not surprising that the disappearance of family members had garnered so much national attention.
To the best of Sloan’s research abilities, the disappearance of her and her birth parents hung around the news cycle for eighteen months before it finally faded. But every decade since the July 4, 1995, disappearance, some branch of the media revisited the crime. In off years it was a short article in the local paper or a feature in the Reno Gazette. For bigger anniversaries, like the twenty-fifth anniversary, the New York Times ran a feature. This past Fourth of July had marked the twenty-ninth year since Sloan and her parents had vanished.
Sloan pushed her laptop away and rubbed her eyes. She’d been at it for hours and needed a break. As she looked at the mounds of information in front of her, she wondered, not for the first time since she had texted Eric Stamos, whether she was insane for believing that she could go to Cedar Creek and find answers to a decades-old mystery that had eluded so many others who had looked.
Fried from her research into the Margolis family, she needed to give her mind a rest. She headed to the gym. Now, along with ten other CrossFitters, her heart raced as she stood in front of the bar that sported a single, round forty-five-pound bumper plate on each side. She clapped her hands together and a cloud of white chalk dust plumed into the air as Aerosmith blared from the gym’s speakers. She bent over the bar, grasped it with her chalked-up hands, and hoisted it up to her shoulders as she dropped into a squat. Pausing for just a moment, she drove out of the squat, feeling her quads burn, before pushing the bar over her head as she hopped into a split step. She held the bar high in the air, locking her elbows to control the shake in her arms as she steadied her core, completing a single clean and jerk. She dropped the bar to the ground where it bounced until it came to rest. Then she repeated the process for a total of fourteen reps, barely securing her elbows on the last one. She dropped the bar a final time and bent over her knees, giving in to the exhaustion. Her quads were saturated with lactic acid and her shoulders were numb. Her heart pounded against her ribcage while sweat covered her body and dripped from her chin.
A few other CrossFitters applauded her effort, knowing Sloan had reached a PR—personal record—during the final rep of the night. She headed to the stationary bike to burn off any remaining anxiety. With her legs spinning and her arms in a continuous back-and-forth motion as she pushed and pulled the handles, Sloan contemplated the upcoming week. She was scheduled to fly to Reno on Friday afternoon and would arrive in Cedar Creek sometime in the evening. She had purchased a one-way ticket, not knowing when she would return to Raleigh. She’d have at least a month before she’d have to be back at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner to satisfy August’s required autopsy observations. To make up for her extended leave, Sloan was scheduled to scrub in with Hayden Cox every day this week, which would buy her some breathing room while she headed to Cedar Creek to meet the Margolis family and look for answers.
The timer on the bike sounded, but with so many thoughts running through her head, Sloan pressed the button for another twenty minutes. She melted on the bike, sweating until her breath was gone and her muscles fatigued. But even her hellish workout wasn’t enough to curb the nervousness she felt about her upcoming trip to meet Nora Margolis.
