The Silent Girl

yet to be invented.
    A year and a half later, the next girl on the list disappeared. Patricia Boles, fifteen, was last seen at a shopping mall, where she’d been dropped off by her mother. Three hours later, Patricia did not show up at the appointed meeting place. She was five foot three, 105 pounds, with blond hair and blue eyes. Like Deborah Schiffer, she was an above-average student who had never been in trouble. Herdisappearance no doubt contributed to the subsequent breakup of her parents’ marriage. Her mother died seven years later; her father, whom Jane was finally able to reach at his current residence in Florida, scarcely wanted to talk about his long-lost daughter. “I’m remarried and I have three kids now. It hurts too much to even hear Patty’s name,” he told Jane over the phone. Yes, he’d received calls from the police over the years about the case. Yes, he’d spoken to Detective Ingersoll recently. But nothing had ever come of those calls.
    After Patty Boles’s disappearance, more than a year passed before the next girl went missing. Sherry Tanaka was sixteen, petite, and a high school junior in Attleboro. She vanished from her own home one afternoon, leaving the front door ajar, her homework still spread across the dining room table. Her mother, who was now living in Connecticut, had recently received a letter from Detective Ingersoll asking to speak with her about Sherry. It was dated April 4, and had been forwarded through a series of old addresses. She had tried calling his phone number just yesterday, but it rang unanswered.
    Because Ingersoll was now dead.
    Mrs. Tanaka did not know any of the girls on the list, nor had she heard of Charlotte Dion. But the name Laura Fang was familiar, because she was an Asian girl like Sherry, and that detail had stuck in Mrs. Tanaka’s mind. It had made her wonder if there was a link. Years ago, she had called the Attleboro police about it, but had heard nothing back since.
    Having three Massachusetts girls go missing over a period of six years was not in itself surprising. Each year across the country, thousands of children between the ages of twelve and seventeen went missing, many no doubt abducted by non–family members. Dozens of girls in Massachusetts had vanished during that same time period, girls in the same age group, who had not made it onto Ingersoll’s list. Why had he focused on these particular victims? Was it because they were of similar ages and statures? Because they were all taken from locations within an easy drive of Highway 495, which encircled the Boston metropolitan area?
    And then there was seventeen-year-old Charlotte Dion. Unlike the other girls, she’d been older and a disinterested C-minus student. How did she fit into the pattern?
    Maybe there was no pattern. Maybe Ingersoll had been searching for links that did not exist.
    Jane set aside the notes on the three girls and turned her attention to the folder on Charlotte, which had been compiled by Detective Buckholz. It was a great deal thicker than Laura Fang’s file, and she had to assume it was because of the Dion name. Wealth did count, even in matters of justice. Especially, perhaps, in matters of justice. A child’s disappearance would forever haunt any parent, would make him wonder as the decades passed if that young woman he glimpsed on the street might be a long-lost daughter, grown up. Or was she just another random stranger like all the others, whose smile or curve of a lip seemed, for an instant, heartbreakingly familiar?
    Jane opened the envelope containing what were probably the last images ever recorded of Charlotte, which they’d obtained from the
Boston Globe
photo files. There were a dozen photos taken at the double burial service of Arthur and Dina Mallory. The horrific nature of their deaths, and the extensive publicity surrounding the Red Phoenix massacre, had drawn nearly two hundred people to the cemetery that day, according to the
Globe
article, and the photographer had taken several long shots of the somberly dressed gathering standing beside two open graves.
    But the most arresting images were the close-ups of the family. Charlotte stood dead center, the dramatic focus of the composition, and no wonder: With her pale features, her long blond hair, she was the fragile embodiment of grief. Her hand was lifted to her mouth, as though to stifle a sob, and her face was contorted in a look of physical pain. Standing on her right was her father,