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Maggie McCain herself had added ample notes in Krystal’s file, most often in connection with the twins Lizzi and Brandi.
Krystal had met the attractive, blonde sixteen-year-olds at a West Philadelphia facility serving DHS, where they’d lived for almost a year. Not church-affiliated, it was two miles from Mary’s House, and twice its size. The girls had found the rules there were fewer, or not strictly enforced, or both, and being opportunistic—if not cunning—teenagers they took advantage of that.
A year after befriending Krystal, Lizzi and Brandi had introduced her to an older girl, all of twenty-one, who impressed them with the money she said she earned serving cocktails at a couple of Philly nightclubs.
Krystal had been so awed that she’d dropped her guard and gushed to Maggie McCain: “She has the latest everything—her hair, her nails, her clothes! And her own place! ‘Ya gotta use what ya got to get what ya want,’ is what she said. She’s going to help find Lizzi and Brandi jobs, and let them share her place until we can get our own.”
“We?” Maggie had blurted.
“I mean them. Lizzi and Brandi.”
But Maggie had understood exactly what she meant.
The girls had led tough lives, ones that most people could not—and, truth told, really did not want to—begin to try to comprehend. The closer the girls got to eighteen, the odds of them being adopted into any family, let alone a stable, loving one, were about as good as the chance they’d be taken bodily into heaven. And the promise of a new, exciting life on their own simply was too tempting.
Maggie at first couldn’t compose a reply.
“Use what you got to get what you want”?
That could not be any clearer. . . .
Then, even as she began saying the words, Maggie knew they were falling on deaf ears: “You girls must be very, very careful, Krystal. You have to understand that there’s a price, sometimes a very steep one. . . .”
—
Maggie McCain sped through the tree-lined cobblestone streets of Society Hill, a posh section of Center City overlooking the Delaware River that dated back to the 1700s.
The knot that had formed in the pit of her stomach at the mention of Lizzi and Brandi felt like it was getting worse.
If those poor girls aren’t dead, they probably wish they were, she thought.
And Krystal may have just missed the same fate.
—
She turned down a brick-paved alleyway, then thumbed the button of the garage door opener clipped to her sun visor. Approaching the back of her three-story town house—in the last year she’d spent a small fortune renovating the hundred-year-old structure—she saw that the wooden door of the garage was almost completely open. The interior was brightly lit.
Glancing up, she saw that there were no lights in the windows of the second and third floors.
Krystal didn’t call back on my house phone, she thought, nosing the Land Cruiser inside the neat, orderly garage. Maybe she went to bed?
Or she’s hiding in the dark . . . ?
Maggie put the SUV in park and turned it off. As she opened her driver’s door, she heard a heavy thump upstairs and what sounded like glass shattering and, a moment later, the rush of air.
Maggie jerked her head, struggling to hear as the garage door closed.
Maybe she fell? But what was—?
The smoke alarms suddenly went off with a steady, ear-piercing squeal.
She got out of the vehicle and ran up the staircase. Reaching the top, she grabbed the doorknob—and instinctively yanked back her hand when she felt the heat. She tugged her thick sweater cuff over her hand, then quickly grabbed and turned the knob.
The door opened onto the kitchen. When she pulled on it, flames flickered out of the crack. She slammed it shut.
What’s that smell? Gas?
She waited for a long moment, then tried again.
