Chapter 4: Six Girls and One Empty Bag
Two patrol cars arrived within four minutes.
A third followed two minutes after that.
The officers were young, both of them, and they listened to me with the careful, neutral expressions of people who had been trained not to react.
I told them everything.
The name switch.
The seventh sleeping bag.
The shoes.
What Lily had whispered to me.
The sedan.
The plate number I had written on the back of a grocery receipt from my purse.
One officer — his badge read TORRES — crouched down to Lily's level.
"Hi there," he said.
"What's your name?"
Lily looked at him for a long moment.
Then she looked up at me.
"It's okay," I said.
"You can tell him your real name."
"Lily," she said.
"My real name is Lily."
"Hi, Lily.
I'm Officer Torres.
You're not in any trouble.
Can you tell me a little bit about last night?"
Lily's grip on my hand tightened.
"Mrs.
Cole said we had to pick new names from a list.
She said it was a game.
She said if we told anyone it wasn't a game, we couldn't come to sleepovers anymore."
Torres didn't write anything down yet.
He just listened.
"What happened after you picked the new names?" he asked.
"A man came.
He wasn't anybody's dad.
He had a camera.
The kind that's big, with the long part on the front." Lily touched her nose, indicating a lens.
"He said we were all so pretty.
He said he was going to take pictures for a special project." She stopped.
"Some of the other girls were excited.
I didn't want to.
I went to the bathroom and locked the door and stayed there until Mrs.
Cole knocked and said he was gone."
Torres stood slowly.
He looked at his partner.
Something passed between them.
"Where are the other girls now?" I asked.
"Their parents were called about an hour ago," Torres said carefully.
"Mrs.
Cole told them there had been a minor incident and that pickup would be early."
"So she was already clearing the house before I arrived."
He didn't confirm it.
He didn't deny it either.
I looked at the front door.
"There are six backpacks in that hallway.
I could see them from the driveway.
But there were seven sleeping bags.
One of those bags belongs to a child whose parents haven't been called.
Or whose bag was left behind on purpose."
Torres turned to his partner.
"Get the sergeant."
While he stepped away, I looked down at Lily.
Her eyes were tracking the officers moving toward Brenda's front door.
She wasn't trembling anymore.
She was watching everything with a focused, quiet attention that no eight-year-old should need.
"Lily," I said softly.
"Did you know the girl whose name was Chloe?
The real Chloe?"
Lily shook her head slowly.
"I never saw her.
But her bag was already there when we got there.
Mrs.
Cole said she'd had to go home early.
But her sleeping bag was still there in the morning.
And her shoes were by the door." She looked down at her own feet.
At the too-small canvas sneakers still crushing her toes.
"Mrs.
Cole made me put them on before you came.
She said my shoes were dirty and these were cleaner." Her voice dropped.
"They weren't cleaner.
They were just different."
The front door of Brenda's house opened.
An officer stepped out and said something quietly to Torres.
Torres came back to me, and his neutral expression had shifted into something harder to read.
"Ma'am," he said.
"We're going to need you and Lily to come to the station and give formal statements.
There's a detective who's going to want to speak with you directly."
"Why?" I asked.
"What did they find?"
He glanced at Lily, then back at me.
"There's a camera memory card that was left behind.
It was found inside the seventh sleeping bag."
I felt the ground tilt slightly under my feet.
"And the name on that sleeping bag," Torres said.
"Chloe.
We ran it against the missing persons database while we were waiting for the sergeant." He paused.
"There's a nine-year-old girl named Chloe Marsh who was reported missing from a town forty miles from here.
Reported missing eight days ago."
The street was very quiet.
"She was never at this sleepover," I said.
May you like
"No," Torres said.
"She wasn't."
