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“Er, yeah. They’re getting ready for school. You’ll have to be quick—”
Jessica follows Amber into the kitchen. Fox and Lark are sitting at the breakfast counter in a long narrow room with three tall windows overlooking Central Park. They glance up at Jessica with tired eyes when she walks in.
“Kids,” says Amber defeatedly. “This is Jessica, the lady I was telling you about yesterday. Jessica just got back from the UK. She spent some time in Barton Wallop and got kind of involved in a big news story over there. And apparently it has some connection to you?”
Jessica sees their eyes widen and their body language shift uncomfortably as they absorb their mother’s words. She also notices that they both look normal. Shadows under their eyes, a scabbed-over pimple by Fox’s nose, dry skin around Lark’s mouth. Both were gazing at their phones when Jessica walked in, and both have slouched postures and frown lines.
“Why do I recognize you?” asks Fox.
“I have no idea, but listen, while I was in Barton Wallop, I met a woman named Debra and she was living with a young girl named Belle, and Belle told me she’d met you, when you were on vacation this summer?” An expedient lie.
The twins exchange a look and shrug in unison.
“She said she’d spent a fair amount of time with you both, that you’d been to her house, hung out?”
“I guess,” says Lark, her voice a little husky.
“Right.” Jessica feels a blaze of frustration at the two recalcitrant children. “Well, I don’t know if you’re both aware, but Belle is not Belle at all. Her real name is Grace Partridge, and she went missing from a school excursion over a year ago with two of her best friends, Audrey and Amina. The woman who calls herself Debra Phipps is now in police custody about to be charged with her abduction, and the British police are searching the grounds for the two other missing girls as I speak. At some point they will want to be speaking to you both, I’m sure. So listen: Is there anything you want to tell me about what happened when you were in the UK this summer?”
The silence that passes after Jessica’s speech is profound. Nobody is breathing, apart from the small black dog who sits on the floor staring expectantly at Fox’s empty cereal bowl and panting lightly.
Amber’s eyes dart sharply from twin to twin. “Well,” she says. “Kids? Is there?”
The siblings glance at each other and then both shake their heads.
“What—nothing?” Jessica prods.
They look at each other again and then Fox speaks up. “I mean, we knew that Belle was, like, kind of weird. I think we thought she was, like, you know, maybe on the spectrum? Or like, borderline personality disorder, you know, she kept changing her stories. One minute her parents were abroad. The next minute they weren’t. One minute she was at school in Suffolk, the next minute she’d left years ago. And there was the agoraphobia? Like, she never wanted to leave the house? So yeah, she was kind of strange. But I would never have thought that there was anything like that going on.”
“And Debra was just nice, you know?” says Lark. “She cooked good food and took such great care of Belle, and of us. I would never have thought she was doing anything bad.”
“Well, your nice Debra put me under her control for a while, using some kind of hypnosis or mind control. Does that mean anything to you?”
“No way,” says Fox. “No. She never did anything like that. The whole thing, the setup, the house, all of it, was just wholesome, y’know. Like the kind of place you’d want to be.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.”
Jessica stares at Fox, notices his defensive body language, the hard set of his jaw. Lark, in contrast, looks uneasy, haunted almost, picking obsessively at the skin around her fingernails.
“How did you meet them? Belle and Debra. What’s the backstory here?” She directs this at Lark, more interested in her take on this situation than her brother’s, as he seems to have an agenda.
She sees the twins exchange another look, and then, interestingly, both turn to glance at their mother.
“What?” says Amber, picking up on the mood.
The twins look at each other again and then Lark says, “Well, Dad has kind of this girlfriend. I mean, she’s not like a technical girlfriend. It’s not serious. She’s helping with the house. I think they hang out sometimes. That’s all it is. And this one time she was there, and she said if we were bored we could walk up the lane, that there was a girl there, in the house? She said to drop by, say hi. So we did.”
“Did you know about her?” Amber asks Jessica.
Jessica nods, apologetically. “Yeah. The locals I met in the pub mentioned that Sebastian had a girlfriend. And then Sebastian backed it up when I asked. He kinda didn’t want you to know about it. Said he thought it might be a sensitive issue.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” says Amber. “How ridiculous. As if I’d care.” But even as she says it, Jessica can hear from the brittle tone of her voice that she does in fact care, very deeply.
“Okay, so this woman, she says you could meet up with this girl, Belle. And what was her connection to them?”
“She said she’d done some work on the house there, for the owner.”
