“Where’s Avery? Where did they take her?”
“I don’t know,” Rose said as she stood. Her knees gave way and she collapsed. Ellen barely caught her before she hit the floor.
“Stay here, I’ll untie Gianna and bring her to you.”
Ellen went back to the girl’s bedroom, trying not to think about where Avery was and who had her and why.
She cut Gianna’s binds off and asked where her wheelchair was.
“They took it so I couldn’t leave,” she said.
Ellen looked in the other rooms and found the wheelchair shoved into the master bedroom. She brought it and helped Gianna get into it, then wheeled her down to the living room.
As soon as Rose saw her, she burst into tears, resting her head in Gianna’s lap.
“It was after midnight,” Carl said. “We were asleep. A man—he pulled us from bed and tied us to the chairs in the kitchen.”
“Did they rob you?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. We have nothing worth much. They were waiting for something, waiting to do something, but I don’t know what.”
“How many?”
“Three. Two men and a young woman, she was between twenty-five and thirty. The younger man was injured, bleeding. He was shot—that much I overheard.”
“You must have heard something else! What are their plans?”
He rubbed his head. “They were hired to steal something, and whoever they stole from was home when he wasn’t supposed to be.”
“Greg Baldwin,” she said, realizing that the people who had herdaughter were the ones who had shot her friend and left him for dead.
Rose said, “They got stuck in the rain last night and came here to wait it out, that’s what we thought, but then they stayed in the morning. I heard one of them say they had one more job.”
“The big guy left first,” Gianna said. “And then Bobby was here, he came back and saw us through the window.”
“He came back?” Ellen was confused.
“Avery told him to go home, over the radio. She said she was spending the night and he needed to go right home, but I guess he knew something was wrong. He came back, looked in my bedroom window, and then the woman saw him and chased him. But she came back pretty quick and said they had to leave before Bobby told anyone they were here.”
Bobby. Her son. He was okay, but where was he? He wasn’t at home when she talked to Jake. Was he hurt? Lost? Out wandering in the storm?
“Why did they take Avery?”
“I don’t know!” Gianna said, holding her sobbing mother. “The woman—her name is Rena!” she added quickly as she remembered. “Rena. That’s what the injured man called her, and he was Sam. I can’t believe I just remembered that.”
“What did she say?”
“They needed Avery just in case.”
Ellen pulled out her cell phone but couldn’t get reception, so she went to the kitchen phone and dialed 911. It rang and rang and rang. Someone would answer eventually, but when? People were probably calling in from all over the region because of the storm.
She hung up, dialed Rick Perez directly.
He answered on the fourth ring and told her to wait.
Several minutes later, he came back. “Ellie? You still there?”
“Yes.”
