Only when they reached the main road did Margaret begin speaking again.
“We have to do something.”
“We need proof,” Jon said. “Real proof. Not body language and old names and what we think we saw from a hill.”
“And if we’re right?”
He gripped the wheel harder.
“Then we go to the police.”
That night Margaret wandered the house as if she were carrying too much electricity to sit still. In the girls’ old bedroom, which she had never fully changed, she sat on one of the small beds and stared at the walls still lined with childhood photographs. Three identical faces smiled from birthdays, holidays, summer afternoons, the ordinary little celebrations that make up a family before catastrophe teaches them the cost of the ordinary.
Jon found her there an hour later.
“I keep thinking about that last morning,” she said without looking up. “I told them to stay where I could see them. But I was doing dishes. I wasn’t really watching. I let them down.”
“You did not,” Jon said firmly, sitting beside her on the bed. “You were being a normal parent in a safe neighborhood. This isn’t your fault.”
“If I had been more careful—”
“He would have found another opportunity,” Jon said. “If he wanted to take them, he would have found a way.”
Margaret turned toward him then, tears already sliding down her face.
“You really think it’s them, don’t you?”
He nodded slowly.
“I think the evidence is strong enough that we have to act as though it could be.”
“How?”
“We start with DNA,” he said. “Hair. Saliva. Skin cells on something discarded. Something the police can test.”
The next opportunity came on Saturday.
The market opened beneath a low gray sky and a thin coastal mist that made the awnings and produce displays look slightly unreal, like a town staged for a memory rather than a morning. Margaret and Jon arrived early and positioned themselves near a coffee stand with a clean view of the Strawberry Sisters’ booth.
At 8:30, a battered pickup pulled into the lot.
Margaret’s heart kicked hard at the sight of the 3 young women climbing down from the cab. They moved fast, unloading crates and display boards with a smooth efficiency that suggested this ritual had been repeated too many times to require thought. Even from a distance, Margaret noticed something else.
Tension.
All 3 women kept glancing toward the market entrance. Toward the lot. Toward the edges of the crowd. Their bodies moved with vigilance, not ease.
“They’re watching for someone,” Jon said.
“For him,” Margaret whispered.
For 2 hours they observed. Customers bought strawberries. The sisters smiled politely, answered questions, made change, and returned to their guarded alertness the second any interaction ended. When a man in work clothes approached the stand unexpectedly, all 3 of them stiffened before realizing he only wanted berries.
“They’re afraid,” Margaret said. “Jon, they’re terrified.”
