Page 43 of City of Liars

Oh, what the hell. I’d spent the whole day restraining myself from putting my hands on her; it didn’t get more innocent than this. I leaned across the table and touched her nose, wiping away the whipped cream. “Here,” I said, showing her the evidence.

Color heated her cheeks. “Oh.” She blinked in embarrassment. “Thanks.”

She ran her fingers through her lush fall of hair, the strands sparking copper, auburn, and a bunch of other shades of red I had no name for in the glow of the overhead lights. It took all I had not to lean across the table and plunge my hands into it, which would’ve given the other diners quite a show. I occupied myself by rearranging the sugar packets, instead.

Unlike me, Liv’s mind was actually on our quest. “That ransom demand…I can’t stop thinking about it. Do you think the mobsters killed James before he could collect?”

I caught the waitress’s eye and raised my cup, asking for another. “I do have one idea, but it’s kind of insane.” It had come to me at The Players, maybe because all of Polk’s blathering about skulls and Hamlet had put me in mind of Shakespearean tragedies.

She tilted her head, looking intrigued. “Do tell.”

“Well,” I began, “what if they went to do the handoff, but then something went south and Charles killed James? So James died, and Ella flipped out and ran away. And that’s why Charles wouldn’t talk to the media about the ransom. Because he was hiding a murder.”

Liv’s mouth fell open. “You’re joking, right?”

I crumpled my napkin into a ball, avoiding her penetrating gaze. “I mean, look at the evidence. There was a ransom, but it was never collected. This James dude turned up dead. Ella disappeared. You’d do anything to get Chloe back if something like this happened to her, right?”

“Of course. But I wouldn’t murder anyone,” she protested.

“Maybe it was an accident.”

She rolled her eyes. “So, to play out your theory… Ella was so traumatized by what she’d witnessed, she ran off and wound up outside Divine Grace, completely mute?”

“Maybe,” I said, folding my napkin into a square and watching it spring free again. “Or maybe, she ran off and got lost. Or kidnapped all over again. Or…killed.”

“That’s a lot of maybes.” Liv’s lips pressed into a thin line. “First, my grandfather’s a child thief. And now, he’s a murderer? Come on, Theo!”

“It’s just a theory.” I heaved a sigh, nodding at the waitress in thanks as she set a fresh shot of espresso down on the table.

Liv sipped her hot chocolate, worry creasing the space between her brows. “Look…hopefully Diane will know something. If Maisie and James lived together, and James took Grandma Ella, then surely Maisie would’ve seen her, right? I mean, where would James have been keeping her over those few days, if not at his house? A kidnapping’s a juicy piece of gossip, just like James’s disappearance and his mob ties. So hopefully, Maisie would’ve told someone in the family what happened, and they might’ve passed it down to Diane.”

“That’s assuming Mystery Girl is Ella, not Lily.” I resisted the urge to smooth the worry line away, downing my espresso instead. “But let the murder theory go for a moment. Here’s another thing that’s bugging me. Why didn’t Divine Grace report the appearance of Mystery Girl to Charles, the way St. Jerome’s reported the girl who died from frostbite?”

Liv frowned. “I’ve been wondering about that, too. Maybe because, like the matron said, they assumed she was left there on purpose by someone who couldn’t take care of her. Or maybe because she showed up four days after Ella disappeared, and they thought there was no way a toddler could survive that long in the snow. But if James had her at his apartment the whole time, that would explain it. And then he came out of hiding to drop her at the orphanage anonymously for whatever reason, but then the mobsters caught up with him and killed him.”

“Right.” I quirked an eyebrow. “Because the guy who wanted money so badly he was willing to steal a child for it had an attack of conscience, figured ‘what the hell, I don’t need the dough that badly,’ and risked his life to return the kid he stole.”

“It’s possible!”

“It is,” I agreed, tracing designs in a spill of sugar on the table. “But so is the fact that none of that ever happened…because by the time Mystery Girl arrived at the orphanage, James was long dead at Charles’s hands, and Ella was gone.”

28

Liv

Ilet the door of Bryant Park Grill swing shut behind me. Next to me, Theo shoved his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket, looking as preoccupied as I felt.

I’d been painfully aware of his proximity all day. When he’d wiped the whipped cream off my nose, I thought that small touch was going to make me combust.

I did my best to ignore the way standing this close to him affected me, but that just meant I thought harder about what we’d learned. What had happened to the little girl who’d left a teddy bear in the snow outside Gramercy Park? Was she sitting on her back porch in North Carolina, wrapped in a blanket, sipping Darjeeling? Had she died shortly after she’d disappeared, even if the body that Charles had identified in the morgue wasn’t hers? A kidnapper could’ve dumped her anywhere, even in the East River, where her body might never have been discovered.

If the latter were true, what had my family done? If my great-grandparents had kept Lily with them based on a lie—a lie they were still perpetuating—how could our family live with ourselves?

And what about the other little girl? I thought it was more than likely that the little girl who’d died of frostbite was Lily Dressler, but what if she wasn’t? If the Dresslers were right, and Grandma Ella was really Lily, then…if the real Ella wasn’t dead, where was she?

What if she hadn’t met a dramatic end, but had been adopted and raised elsewhere, with no idea that her original family was desperate to find her? It had been sheer luck that Daniel and Esther Stenson had seen the article in the Chicago Tribune. What were the chances that a second family would have done the same, especially if they didn’t live in a major city?

Then there was Theo’s wacky theory, that Charles Carter was a murderer. It had seemed ridiculous when he first mentioned it, but what he’d said about Chloe… He was right, I’d do anything to get her back. Would I kill someone to save her? I hated to admit it, even to myself, but I thought the answer might be yes.