I might have landed on the list myself if I were an inch shorter, but as it was, I ended up with fifty-one names.
Finally, I cross-checked those names against the flight manifests to and from airports in the Chicago vicinity on Thursday and Friday. I came up empty with that, but as I looked over the list again, I did recognize some of the fifty-one names: two dispatch personnel, six police officers, including Officer Jameson, the man who’d researched the owner to Bearcroft Mine, and Lance Rietlin, the young resident from the medical examiner’s office who’d led me and Cheyenne to the morgue.
Lancaster Cowler had mentioned that someone from the ME’s office had accessed the 911 transcriptions. That’s where Lance worked. He was also one of the three people who’d responded when Cheyenne had intercommed for help in the morgue.
I uploaded the list to the online case files and emailed a copy of it to Cheyenne, asking her to follow up on all of the names, specifically on Rietlin.
Then the flight attendant announced that we were beginning our final descent to the Denver International Airport, and as the seat belt sign went on, I folded up my computer and got ready to go to work.
Over the last four hours, Giovanni had taken one man and one woman to his self-storage unit against their will. However, since then he’d had to follow up on some work-related business and was only now able to slip back to check on them.
He found that they were both still secure. Still alive.
Good. He would return later tonight to take care of that.
Before leaving the storage unit, he made sure that his duffel bag was packed with all the necessary items and checked the temperature of the warming pad: 84 degrees.
Perfect. He placed the pad on the backseat of his car, laid the cloth bag containing his three remaining rattlesnakes on top of it, locked the storage unit, and went to find Amy Lynn.
98
4:40 p.m.
“Well?” Tessa said.
“Just chill,” Dora replied, her mouth thick with gum. “I’m looking.” Earlier in the day, Martha had removed the diary from Tessa’s trash can but had returned it to her when she’d asked for it after school.
Now, as Tessa waited As Patiently As Humanly Possible for Dora to find her dad’s last name, she twisted and untwisted the sides of the Rubik’s Cube, solving it twice-but it didn’t count because she had her eyes open.
After five more minutes of waiting, Tessa asked again, “Anything?”
“I’m going as fast as I can, but it’s hard. Your mom didn’t use last names.”
I already told you that!
“I know,” Tessa moaned. “Like I said before, don’t look so much at what she wrote. More the other stuff. The letters. The postcards. The things she glued in there.”
“I am,” Dora snapped, in a tone of voice Tessa had never heard her friend use.
“Sorry.”
“Yeah. I know. It’s just, I’m doing my best, OK?”
A moment of uncomfortable silence crawled through the room.
Finally, Tessa said, “I read your story last night.”
“My story?”
“The one about your name. Pandora’s Box. I should have read it before, way earlier, I know. But anyway, you were right. I thought it would end with some kind of plague or infection or something, but it doesn’t.”
Dora looked up from the diary. “So, you know what the last thing out of the box was?”
“Yes,” Tessa said. “It was hope.”
Dora started slowly thumbing through the diary again.
“I like how it begs her to let it out, and finally when she does. ..”
But Dora had stopped flipping pages and was staring at the diary.
“What?” Tessa asked.
Her friend was silent.
“What is it?” Tessa dropped the cube and crawled across the bed toward her friend. “What did you find?”
Dora answered by handing the diary to her, and Tessa saw the postcard pasted onto the page:
Christie,
Found your address online. I still think of you.
I hope you’re well.
– Paul
It’d been postmarked just three years earlier and sent to the address in New York City where Tessa and her mom had lived before they ever met Patrick.
And it included a handwritten return address: P. Lansing, 1682 Hennepin Avenue East, Minneapolis, MN 55431.
Suddenly, everything about her dad seemed more real than ever. He was an actual person who lived at an actual address on a specific date.
Your last name should have been Lansing.
Tessa Lansing.
Tessa Lansing.
Tessa Bernice Lansing.
She read the note again. It was too brief to really tell her anything-except that Paul Lansing had never really gotten over her mom. Quietly, half to herself, half to her friend, Tessa said, “He doesn’t say anything about me.”
Dora chewed her gum squishily for a moment, then took it out and stuck it to a piece of crumpled paper in the trash. “Maybe he doesn’t know about you.”
“What?” Tessa watched Dora shove the trash can away from the bed. “What do you mean? When she was pregnant he wrote to her asking-”
“No, I know all that. I mean, what if he didn’t know you were even born?”
“That’s not possible.”
“Why not?” Dora asked.
“I don’t know, it’s just-he had to.”
A slight pause. “Did your mom ever actually say that he was the one who moved away?”
Tessa let the diary slide from her fingers and land on the pillow beside her. “Are you saying my mom did instead?”
Dora shrugged. “Sure, I don’t know. Why not?” She was unwrapping a fresh piece of gum. “I mean, she was scared and didn’t want him in her life. Maybe she just packed up and left to start over somewhere else.”
It seemed unbelievable.
But also, not so unbelievable.
Paul wanted to help raise you. If he knew you were alive, he would have come to be with you, especially after Mom died.
But as Tessa thought about it, she realized that she couldn’t remember her mother ever telling her outright that her dad was the one who’d moved away from them. Maybe she’d just assumed that he “So, now what?” Dora was chewing again.
Tessa’s racing, quivering heart made it hard to think, hard to consider her options. “I don’t know.”
Maybe she could just pretend that she hadn’t found the memory box or the diary or Paul’s letter and his postcard, and just go on with life like none of this had ever happened.
Yeah, right. As if that would work.
On the other hand… Tessa stared at the postcard. The address.
She grabbed her school backpack, pulled out her laptop, and flipped it open.
“Wait.” Dora scooted closer to her. “You’re not thinking-”
“Yeah,” Tessa said, “I am.”
Martha didn’t have wireless, but one of the neighbors did, and Tessa was able to jump onto their network. She clicked to an online white pages site and typed Paul Lansing’s name in the search box.
Pressed “enter.”
99
As soon as the plane landed, I slid out my cell.
I needed to connect with Cheyenne to follow up on any leads generated by the list of fifty-one names, however, I didn’t like the fact that John had left a note for me at the crime scene earlier in the day. So, before heading out to spend the rest of the night tracking him, I wanted to make sure that Tessa and my mother were safe.
Maybe if Cheyenne could meet me at my parents’ house I could kill two birds with one stone.
I punched in her number, but the line was busy. So I left a voicemail asking her to meet me, ASAP. Then I told her the address, and before I ended the call, I thanked her for the pendant and assured her that my testimony had gone fine.
Which was true, whether or not justice ended up being carried out.
A few minutes later as we were taxiing to our gate, the phone vibrated and I thought it might be Cheyenne returning my call, but when I answered it, I found myself talking to Dr. Eric Bender.