Chapter 1
Maryse swung open the bedroom door, a huge smile on her face. A few minutes earlier, she’d turned on the news and learned that black ice had forced her daughter’s school to close for the day. She knew a lot of moms would be cursing the weather and cursing the school board and wondering what they were going to do with their kids on this extra wintery day. But Maryse was thrilled. She didn’t mind the cold. She didn’t mind a day off. And she didn’t mind an excuse to pull out the ice skates and do loops on the pond with her daughter.
“Rise and shine, Camille!” she called to the lump of blankets on the bubble gum–pink bed.
Not that she thought the six-year-old could hear her, but because old habits die hard. And sometimes, Maryse thought if she didn’t speak out loud now and again, she might lose her voice altogether.
Besides that...though she was deaf, the little girl was impossible to sneak up on. She heard everything in her own way.
You vibrate, Cami signed to her once.
Vibrate? Maryse had repeated, thinking she’d missed something.
Though Cami was a natural ASL speaker and had been taught the proper grammatical rules from the time she was small, Maryse knew her own understanding was sometimes lacking. She tended to try to translate what she wanted to say from English first, and it often mucked things up. But this particular time, she’d got it right.
Vibrate, her daughter confirmed, then giggled and added, Like an elephant walking across the floor.
Maryse smiled at the memory and twisted the blind slats open just enough to let in the sunshine, and with it, a puff of cold air. Because Quebec weather could be deceptive like that. The glowing orb up there in the sky looked so much like it should be warm. Like it wanted to provide some heat. But it was an unforgiving light instead.
For a second, the chill seemed ominous, and a shiver made Maryse wrap her arms around her own body, rubbing her palms against the comforting fuzz of her faux-angora sweater. Then she pushed off her worry and reminded herself that today was going to be a fun day.
“Nothing a jacket won’t fix. Right, sweet pea?” she said as she turned back toward the bed. But the down comforter didn’t move. Not an inch. “Camille?”
She stepped forward and put out a hand, wondering if her daughter was sick. But when she reached for Camille’s shoulder, she found a pillow instead.
Panic didn’t set in right away—the little girl was fond of pranks. And hide-and-seek.
“Very funny!” Maryse said, then gestured, too, in case her daughter was hiding somewhere she could see.
She moved around the room, peeking into the usual hiding spots. The closet. The book cubby. Under the bed, then in the tiny bathroom that adjoined the room. Empty.
She stood in the bedroom’s doorway, put her hands on her hips and turned slowly, searching for her too-clever girl. Stuffed animals and knickknacks galore dominated the shelves.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” she called, her hands moving to make the words come to life.
As Maryse turned to move her search to the rest of the house, her sock-covered foot slipped on something on the floor, and she slid across the carpet, landing on one knee. She bit back a curse—Camille always seemed to know when she let one drop—and reached out to snap up the offending object.
What the— A key card?
She frowned down at the slim piece of plastic.
Maison Blanc.
She flipped it over and found an address in Laval. The city was an hour and a half south of the tiny town, LaHache, where they lived.
“Where’d you get this one, Cami?” she murmured as she pushed herself to her feet, then set the card beside the rest of the odd little trinkets on the nearest shelf.
Collecting things was a Camille habit. Just one of the hobbies that made the kid interesting.
Maryse smiled to herself, then stepped out to scan the hallway. “Okay, kiddo. Give me a hint.”
But the house stayed silent, and as she covered the scant eight hundred square feet of space, her smile began to slip.
All closets. Nope, nope and nope twice more.
Every cupboard large enough to hold a fifty-pound child. Nothing.
Concern crept in quickly.
“Camille!” Maryse called her daughter’s name loudly. Useless, she knew. But she still did it again. “Cami!”
She looked in the laundry basket and up the sooty chimney. With her heart in her throat and thoughts of the subzero temperature outside on her mind, she eased open the only entrance to the house—a door off the living room. But all she found was the same day-old dusting of snow that had coated the patio yesterday. Impossible for Camille to have gone over it without a trace. Relief made her sag temporarily.
But where is she?
Maryse took a breath and made her way back to the bedroom, where she scanned for some hint of something she might’ve missed. Her eyes found the window, then stayed there. Her brain grabbed a thought and hung on to it.
That little blast of cold air...
Woodenly, she stepped closer. She gripped the blinds’ rod and turned. And yes. There it was. Evidence. The childproof lock had been forced across the ridge at the bottom of the window, leaving a nasty groove through the metal. And when Maryse pushed the blinds aside, she could see the sliver of an opening.
Oh, God. Please, no.
Her heart thumped hard against her rib cage as she spun back to the pile of pink bedding. Then she saw it sticking out from under one of the frilly pillows: a slip of familiar notepaper dotted with fluttering butterflies.
Maryse snatched it up, her hand shaking so badly she almost couldn’t read the words that were written there in large, deliberate block letters. She inhaled and forced herself to go still.
Two sentences. Two. And they were enough to take her world, stop it from spinning, then flip it in the other direction.
I TOOK WHAT YOUR BROTHER OWED ME. CONSIDER HIS FATE A WARNING - NO POLICE.
She breathed in. She breathed out.
She fought the threatening blackness and made herself look at Camille’s familiar things. The favorite stuffed bunny, one loose ear and one eye gone. The ribbon she used as a bookmark tucked into the pages of her latest read. The radio she insisted on having even though she couldn’t listen to it.
And then her eyes landed on the single item in the room that she was certain she hadn’t seen before.
The key card for Maison Blanc. A clue. But what did it mean she should do?
The police!
The urge to call them was instinctual. Logical, even. Or it would be under normal
