My daughter’s husband told me she had gone away for a week-long retreat, even insisting that I “respect her privacy.” I didn’t argue; I drove a short distance away, parked, and walked back through the rain. At the back of the house, I saw a new lock on the garage door. When I whispered, “If that’s you, knock,” I heard three knocks that compelled me to call the police.

"Emily!"

I dropped to my hands and knees on the cold, grease-slicked concrete. I didn't care that the motor oil seeped through my trousers, staining my skin. I reached down through the heavy square openings of the cast-iron grate, my fingers straining into the blackness below.

Five inches down, my fingertips brushed something cold, wet, and trembling.

Skin.

"I’m here, darling. I’m here. Thomas, get this chain off! Get it off now!"

Davies stepped forward with the thirty-six-inch bolt cutters. The hardened steel jaws bit into the links of the chain. With a grunt that tore from his throat, he leaned his weight into the handles.

*SNAP.*

The metal link sheared with a bright, violent spark. Davies kicked the remaining loops free and, together with Miller, hauled the heavy cast-iron potting bench three feet to the side. Its iron legs screeched against the concrete like a dying animal.

Miller pulled the trapdoor open.

The pit was four feet wide, five feet deep—an old cistern pump bay, brick-lined and perpetually seeped with groundwater. Three inches of freezing, stagnant water covered the floor.

Emily was curled in the corner, her knees drawn tightly against her chest, wearing only a pair of threadbare flannel pajamas that were soaked to the hips. Her lips were a deep, bruised violet; her dark hair was matted with grime and lime dust from the mortar. Her hands were raw, the skin over her knuckles split and weeping blood where she had beaten them against the underside of the wood and the brickwork.

Around her neck, secured to an iron ring bolt in the brick wall with a short length of nylon climbing rope, was a heavy zip-tie collar.

She looked up into the glare of the flashlights, squinting, shivering so violently that her teeth clicked together like castanets.

"Mom..." she breathed, her voice barely more than a hiss of air through dry lips. "He... he said you weren't coming. He said... he said you forgot."

"Never," I whispered, reaching down into the pit, my hands locking under her armpits. "Miller, help me!"

Miller reached down with his massive hands, gripping Emily by the belt of her trousers and her shoulder, and hauled her upward with a single, smooth, controlled heave.

She weighed almost nothing. She had always been slender, but in the five days since I had last seen her, she had withered. Her skin was parchment-dry, hot to the touch despite the freezing air—fever, high and dangerous, fueled by infection in her lacerated hands.

Miller laid her down on the dry wool blanket Cranston had run out to the cruiser to retrieve. I immediately wrapped it around her, tucking the edges beneath her shivering feet, pulling her head onto my lap.

"The papers..." Emily whispered, her fingers clutching at the lapel of my coat with the desperate strength of a drowning person. "Under the floorboards... Mom... in the greenhouse. Under the seed flats. He made me... he made me sign the power of attorney. He was going to... he was going to take me to the reservoir tonight."

Miller froze. He looked down at Emily, his face completely pale under the harsh LED light.

"He told you that?" Miller asked, his voice dropping into a register that made the hair on my arms stand up.

"He had the hypodermic... in the kitchen drawer," Emily wept, the tears carving clean channels through the grime on her cheeks. "Insulin. He said... he said people who are depressed... they wander off during retreats all the time. He said nobody would ever look for me in the deep water."

From the front hallway, the sound of a scuffle erupted.

"Get your hands off me!" Daniel's voice shrieked, accompanied by the dull thud of a body hitting a drywall partition and the metallic rattle of handcuffs being ratcheted tight. "You have no right! This is an unlawful entry! I have rights!"

Miller stood up slowly. He wiped his hands on his trousers. He didn't look like an officer of the court anymore; he looked like an executioner who had just read the final decree.

"Davies," Miller said, his voice terrifyingly quiet. "Call the bus. Tell the paramedics we have an adult female, severe hypothermia, sepsis risk, evidence of strangulation and unlawful imprisonment. Code Three. Lights and sirens."

"On it, Boss."

Miller turned toward the hole in the drywall. "Margaret. Stay with her."

"Thomas," I called out, my hand stroking Emily's cold, damp hair back from her forehead. "The chain around his neck. Ensure you log it into the record yourself. If he touches that ring again, I will take it off him with pruning shears."