Chapter 7: Rhinebeck
The property outside Rhinebeck was eleven acres of second-growth woodland with a single-lane gravel road and a farmhouse that had not been listed for sale or rent in public records for nine years.
Dominic arrived with two of his own men and two federal agents from Hargrove's office at eleven twenty-three at night.
The farmhouse had lights on in two windows.
There was a truck in the gravel lot.
There was smoke from the chimney.
Dominic called Vincent from the tree line.
"There's someone inside."
Vincent was already in the car.
He had left Charles Bellamy in the custody of two men he trusted and driven north with one thought and no plan beyond the next mile.
"Don't go in without Hargrove's people," he said.
"They're here.
We're going in now."
The call stayed open.
Vincent heard gravel.
A door.
Voices — Dominic's voice, another man's voice raised in surprise, a short exchange he couldn't fully follow.
Then footsteps inside.
A second door.
Then silence.
Then Dominic's voice, changed.
"Vincent."
"Tell me."
"She's here."
The car drifted slightly.
Vincent corrected it without thinking.
"Is she—"
"She's alive." Dominic's voice was rough in a way Vincent had never heard before.
"She's — she's okay.
She's sitting up.
She's talking." A pause.
"She asked if you got her message."
Vincent pulled over onto the shoulder of the road.
He sat there for a moment with the engine running and the phone against his ear and the dark road ahead of him and did not speak.
"Vincent."
"I'm here."
"She wants to know if you signed the papers."
He looked at his right hand on the steering wheel.
The hand that had been holding the pen.
"No," he said.
"I didn't sign anything."
He heard Dominic relay it.
He heard, distantly, a woman's voice.
He could not make out the words.
But he knew the voice.
He had known it the moment it came through a cracked phone in the hands of an eight-year-old girl in a faded blue sweater.
He put the car back into drive.
Marcus Rourke was detained at the property by Hargrove's agents.
He did not resist.
He sat in the back of the federal vehicle and said nothing except to ask, twice, whether Charles Bellamy had already made a deal.
When the agents told him that was not their department, he looked out the window and stayed quiet for the rest of the drive.
Sofia had been held in the farmhouse for twenty-two months before Rourke moved her to a second location — a rented property in Connecticut — and then back again when the Connecticut arrangement became complicated.
She had not been physically harmed in the ways that were easiest to see.
But she had been alone, and isolated, and she had spent three years not knowing whether Vincent believed she had left him.
The federal paramedics cleared her at the scene.
She refused the hospital until morning.
She sat in the farmhouse kitchen wrapped in a blanket someone had found, and she drank tea that one of Hargrove's agents made badly, and she answered questions in the careful, precise way she had always answered questions — directly, without drama, with the particular composure of someone who has had a long time to decide how they want to carry themselves when the moment finally comes.
Dominic sat across from her at the kitchen table.
"He's twenty minutes out," he said.
"I know." She wrapped both hands around the mug.
"How is Grace?"
"Scared.
Relieved.
Her daughter is the one who played the voicemail."
Sofia looked up.
"Emily?"
"She found the phone in the sewing box.
She's eight now."
Sofia was quiet for a moment.
"She was five when I sat on the laundry room floor with her." She looked at the table.
"She remembered."
"She remembered the necklace too," Dominic said.
"That's what started it.
Isabella was wearing your pendant."
Sofia's expression shifted.
Not anger.
Something more complicated than anger.
"Isabella didn't know," Dominic said.
"Charles gave it to her.
She had no idea what it was."
"I know," Sofia said.
"That sounds like him.
Use people who don't know they're being used.
Cleaner that way." She paused.
"Is she all right?"
"Shaken.
She cooperated fully once she understood what was happening."
Headlights crossed the kitchen window.
Sofia set the mug down.
She did not stand up immediately.
She sat for one more moment, her hands flat on the table, her eyes on the door.
Then she stood.
The door opened.
Vincent stood in the frame.
He looked at her the way a man looks at something he had taught himself not to believe in anymore.
Neither of them spoke for a moment.
"You didn't sign," she said.
"No."
"Because of Emily."
"Because of you," he said.
"It was always because of you."
May you like
She crossed the kitchen.
He met her halfway.
