“Where are you going?” Jameson called after me.
I didn’t look back over my shoulder, couldn’t quite bring myself to look at any of them. “To make a call.”
Vincent Blake answered on the fifth ring, a power play in and of itself.
“Presumptuous little thing, aren’t you?”
You’re young. You’re female. You’re nobody—use that.
“Eve is gone,” I said, banishing any hint of emotion from my tone. “You don’t have anyone on the inside now.”
“You seem very sure of that, little girl.” Blake was amused, like my attempt at playing this game was nothing to him but that—an amusement.
He wants me to believe that he has someone else inside Hawthorne House. Staying silent even a moment too long would have been seen as weakness, so I spoke. “You want the truth about what happened to your son.
You want his remains found and returned to you.” My breathing wanted to go shallow, but I was a better bluffer than that. “What, besides Toby, will you give me if I deliver what you want?”
I didn’t know where whatever remained of William Blake was. But a person could only play the cards they’d been dealt. Blake thought that I had something he wanted. Without Eve here, I might be his only way of getting it.
I needed an advantage. I needed leverage. Maybe this was it.
“What will I give you?” Blake’s amusement deepened into something darker, twisted. “What, besides Toby, do I have that you want? I am so very glad you asked.”
The line went dead. He’d hung up on me. I stared down at my phone.
A moment later, Oren stepped into my peripheral view. “There’s a courier at the gate.”
CHAPTER 71
There was no point in cross-examining the person who delivered the package. We knew who it was from. We knew what he wanted.
“Everything okay?” Libby asked me when Oren’s man appeared in the foyer with the package. I shook my head. Whatever this is—it’s definitely not okay.
Oren completed his initial security screen, then handed both the contents and the packaging over to me: one gift box large enough to hold a sweater; inside it, thirteen letter-sized envelopes; inside each envelope, a clear, thin, rectangular sheet of plastic with an abstract black-and-white design inked onto it. Looking at any one sheet in isolation was like doing one of those inkblot tests.
“Stack them,” Jameson suggested. I wasn’t sure when he’d come into the room, but he wasn’t alone. All four of the Hawthorne brothers circled around me. Libby hung back, but only slightly.
I laid sheet on top of sheet, the designs combining to form a single picture—but it wasn’t that easy. Of course it wasn’t. There were four ways that each sheet could go— up or down, front or back.
I felt the sheets with my fingertips, locating the side on which the ink had been printed. Moving with lightning speed, I began matching the sheets in the lower left corner, using the patterns to guide me.
One, two, three, four—no, that one’s the wrong way. I kept going, one sheet on top of another on top of another, until a picture emerged. A black-and-white photograph.
And in that photograph, Alisa Ortega lay on a dirt floor, her head lolled to one side, her eyes closed.
“She’s alive,” Jameson said beside me. “Unconscious. But she doesn’t look…”
Dead, I finished for him. What, besides Toby, do I have that you want? I could hear Vincent Blake saying. I am so very glad you asked.
“Lee-Lee.” Nash didn’t sound calm, not this time.