He led her through the sliding doors and into a tasteful living room decorated in shades of blue. It opened onto an old-fashioned kitchen with white cabinets and appliances that had to be as old as the house. There wasn’t a crumb on the counters or a dish in the sink.
“You’re awfully tidy for a man,” Nessa said, though Jonathan had been tidy, too. “I drop by unannounced, and your house is spick-and-span.”
“That’s what ten years in the military will do to you. For your information, I’m a whiz with an iron, too.” He shot her a wink over his shoulder and Nessa clapped a hand to her heart as though ready to swoon.
Down a short hall from the living room were the cottage’s two bedrooms. The door to one was open, and Nessa could see a perfectly made bed with a nightstand beside it. Franklin opened the second door, and the smile slipped off Nessa’s face. The walls were plastered with pictures of girls. White girls and brown girls—they all looked like babies to Nessa. File boxes sat stacked against the walls, and three computer monitors cluttered an old desk.
“What is all of this?” Nessa asked.
“After your They Walk Among Us interview aired, I knew my days on the force were numbered. So I went straight to headquarters and started making copies of files I thought could prove useful,” he said.
“Who are these girls?”
“Missing persons cases going back a couple of decades,” Franklin said. “All were last seen on the island. Most lived here, but some were just visiting. All between the ages of thirteen and eighteen.”
“How many are there altogether?”
“I started with hundreds,” Franklin said. “I’ve managed to narrow it down to a couple dozen girls who might be connected. About two-thirds vanished in the last couple of years.”
Could they all be Spencer Harding’s victims? Nessa shuddered at the thought. “A woman came up to me in the store the other day. She said her daughter disappeared a year ago when she was visiting the island from Queens. Her name was Lena.” Nessa tapped her temple trying to dislodge the girl’s last name from her brain.
Franklin already had it. “You must mean Lena Collins.” He walked across the room to a picture pinned to the far wall. Nessa stepped forward and recognized the girl from the photo her mother had pulled from her wallet. “Seventeen years old. Captain of her school’s soccer team. Came out with a friend whose grandparents have a house not too far from here. It was two weeks before her high school graduation. File says she ran away, but there was nothing to suggest that this girl wasn’t happy at home.”
“And Harriett mentioned a girl who worked on Culling Pointe a couple of years ago. She disappeared after serving drinks at a party thrown by a man named Jackson Dunn.”
“Rosalia Cortez.” He took a few steps and tapped a picture of a stunning young woman with wild black hair and sweet eyes. “Also seventeen. She and her mother came here on H-2B visas to work on the Pointe. She was saving money to attend a nursing college in Guadalajara. Her school records were in the file. The girl was smart as hell—not the kind of person who’d be easily duped.”
“You know them all,” Nessa marveled.
“Of course,” Franklin said. “If you’re looking for someone, it helps to know who they are.”
“It sounds like no one really looked before.”
“No,” Franklin said. “Girls this age are often assumed to be runaways. But girls don’t run away if they’re saving for nursing school. And they don’t run away if they’re two weeks from their high school graduation.”
“And you think all these disappearances could all be connected to Spencer Harding?”
“Not all of them,” Franklin said. “But maybe a few. And if so, their families deserve to know.”