The 3 sisters exchanged glances. Something moved across their faces, faint and fast. Confusion. Caution. Recognition trying not to be recognized.
“That’s an odd question,” Sophie said carefully.
“Sometimes,” Stella admitted softly. “Sometimes I dream about a woman with dark hair who used to sing to us. But they’re just dreams.”
Margaret’s hand flew to her mouth.
She had sung to them every night. Lullabies, folk songs, whatever came to her while she sat on the edge of their beds in the warm half-dark, 3 identical faces looking up at her, 3 little bodies settling at the sound of her voice. That memory had never left her. And now one of them, standing full-grown in a farmers market, was reaching toward it from inside whatever false life had been built around her.
“Margaret,” Jon said sharply. “We need to go.”
This time she let him lead her.
They walked back through the market in silence, past stalls and customers and noise that now seemed unreal. She could hear the sisters talking behind them in voices too low to make out, and even from that distance she felt tension enter the air around their stand.
When they reached the car, Margaret turned to Jon with both hands shaking.
“Did you see them?”
He didn’t pretend not to understand.
“I saw.”
“The way they moved. Their faces. The names.”
He started the engine with hands not entirely steady.
“But Margaret,” he said carefully, “we cannot jump to conclusions. Fifteen years is a long time. We could be seeing what we want to see.”
“Robert Greenfield,” she said, staring through the windshield. “Jon, I know that name. Detective Carson mentioned him.”
Jon was quiet.
“I remember a lot of names from those days,” he said at last. “Most of them led nowhere.”
“He was their science teacher,” Margaret said. “He knew them. He knew us. And now he has 3 daughters who look exactly like our girls and have the same names.”
Her voice broke on the last word.
Jon gripped the steering wheel and looked at the crowded market through the glass as if the answer might be waiting somewhere in ordinary motion.
“How many times have we thought we saw them?” he asked. “How many photographs, how many phone calls, how many girls in grocery stores or county fairs or gas stations turned into other people’s daughters once we got close enough?”
He was not wrong. That was what made this so cruel. Hope, after enough years, becomes a dangerous thing. It teaches grief new ways to wound.
But Margaret shook her head.
“This is different.”
That evening she sat at the kitchen table with the local phone book spread open, looking for Greenfield in the residential listings, then the business section, then the agricultural pages. Jon stood in the doorway with a coffee mug in his hand, watching the old urgency return to her in a way he had not seen for years.
“There’s no Robert Greenfield in the residentials,” she said. “But there’s a Greenfield Organic Farms with a P.O. box.”
“Of course there is,” Jon muttered. “If someone wanted to hide 3 kidnapped children, they wouldn’t exactly put a street address in the paper.”
