Read The Judas Child for Free Online Page B

you know anything about her people? What her father did for a living—her mother?”
    “No.” He threw up his hands, defeated. “She said her family left town when she was in the fifth grade.” And now one fist pounded the floor, and the stack of yearbooks toppled over.
    She knew he hadn’t slept since yesterday, but this was more than fatigue. His frustration helped her to gauge how much he’d had to drink. This tone only entered his voice when he wasn’t thinking clearly, when intoxication was an obstacle to an idea. Normally, his mind worked much faster than hers, and better. Perhaps this was why he stopped at Dame’s Tavern every night, to slow down that beautiful fleet brain.
    “At least you know she didn’t go to St. Ursula’s. That’s something.” In her younger days as a reporter, she had chased people down without much more information. So the child had moved away when she was a fifth-grader. There was only one public elementary school in town, and there would be group portraits on record. Ah, but wait—she had her own photographs.
    Ellen reached out and opened the lower drawer of Susan’s bureau. She rested one hand on her daughter’s scrapbook. “Rouge? This woman you met? Maybe she was in the children’s choir. That was a mix of kids from both schools.” She pulled out the scrapbook and flipped through the pages, looking for the yearly snapshots of the choir field trips.
    “The choir—right. She remembered my scar.” Now he was shoulder to shoulder with her. He put out his hand to stop the falling pages at one large photograph. “That one. Was it taken the year I cut my finger?”
    “Cut? You almost cut it off , Rouge.” She looked down at the three rows of children, kneeling and standing, all holding their ice skates and grinning for the camera. She pointed to the first girl in the front row. “Now that’s Meg Tomlin, the fire chief’s daughter. She moved to Coopers-town when she got married three years ago. And that’s Jenny Adler. You remember her from St. Ursula’s? She graduated from MIT and went to work for a company in Tokyo.”
    He was staring at her face—all curiosity now. She understood. Rouge was wondering how a housebound recluse like herself would know of these events in the world outside.
    “Well, babe, the family may not own any of the newspapers anymore, but I do read them. You’d be surprised what I know.”
    “You still have any of your old sources?”
    “Oh, I’m sure I do.” And apparently, all the old friends had turned out for her. There were a number of similarities between her daughter’s kidnapping and the recent theft of two more children from St. Ursula’s, yet there was no mention of Susan in the newspapers or the television coverage. But that protection wouldn’t last if these girls turned up dead on Christmas morning.
    Her son was staring at her, momentarily distracted from the scrapbook. “Mom, what do you know about the lieutenant governor?”
    “Marsha Hubble? She comes from a long line of politicians, but I’d swear she’s clean. That’s despite proximity to a mobbed-up senator.”
    “And the puppet governor?”
    “ Alleged puppet, dear. He’s been trying to unload Hubble for the past year. My theory is that she doesn’t play nicely with major campaign contributors of the cockroach persuasion.”
    Rouge bowed his head over the scrapbook, but his eyes were looking inward. Ellen knew she was losing him again. She pointed to a child in the middle row of the photograph. “Look here. This girl has wide-set eyes, but I have no idea who she is. Damn, after all my showboating.”
    She turned the photograph over to read the names of all the children. The list, penned in her own hand, was one name short. The child with the wide-set eyes was the only member of the choir she could not account for. “Sorry, Rouge. I can’t remember her.”
    “She has a scar. Here.” He ran one finger down his right cheek in a jagged line. “Do you