black shutters and front door. They parked behind a green BMW and the front door opened before they were halfway up the walk.
A red-haired woman in a business suit, who looked like an older version of the girl tied to the tree, greeted them without preamble. “Have you found her?”
Oz glanced quickly at Stephanie with a look that conveyed how shitty this was going to be. Then he said, “Are you Mrs. Wycoff?” Not because either of them were in any doubt, but you had to ask, you had to follow procedure.
“Yes, yes. I called last night and this morning. Where is my daughter? Have you found her?”
“Could we speak inside, Mrs. Wycoff?”
“Oh, God.” She was a tall woman with good posture, but she seemed to fold in on herself a little. “Yes, okay, yes.” She stepped back for them to pass and Stephanie stepped inside the cool hallway while trying to compose her own nerves.
“Is there a Mr. Wycoff?” Oz asked.
The woman frowned. Her trembling lips drew together in a thin line. “We’re divorced.”
They were standing in a tiled entranceway, the beige of the floor complementing the walls, which were painted in a corresponding shade of cream. On one wall was a painting of a placid landscape in a gilt frame, on another a gilt-framed mirror. All very ordered, very serene.
Oz glanced at Stephanie. She took the lead. “Mrs. Wycoff, when was the last time you saw Morgan?”
“Yesterday afternoon. I helped her move in. She was supposed to call me last night, but she didn’t. When she didn’t call this morning I phoned the police.”
“Instead of the school?”
Mrs. Wycoff nodded. “Morgan wasn’t happy there. She threatened to leave more than once.” One hand moved to her mouth in a fretful gesture. The other thin arm was pressed against her stomach. “Please. Has something happened?”
“I’m sorry to have to tell you that the body of a girl matching Morgan’s description was found this morning at St. Ursula’s.”
The woman uttered a groan so deep that it sounded primeval. She shook her head slowly at first, then faster, whipping it back and forth.
“We’ll need you to identify your daughter,” Oz said gently.
“No, no. God, no.”
Stephanie reached out a hand to steady her, but Mrs. Wycoff jerked out of her reach. “No!” she said again, screaming it this time.
“We’re so sorry,” Oz said.
“It isn’t Morgan,” the other woman said. “It isn’t!”
“Do you have any family member that we could call?” Stephanie asked.
Mrs. Wycoff shook her head and for the first time tears sprang to her eyes. “It’s just us. I’m an only child and so is Morgan. My mother’s in a nursing home.”
“How about a friend?”
In the end a neighbor came with them, a seventy-some-year-old woman in a baby-pink twinset with a matching headband in her iron-gray hair. She smelled faintly of menthol and gin, but she clutched Mrs. Wycoff’s hand firmly.
They took them both in the back of the car to the medical examiner’s offices. By the time they got there the body had been delivered, cleaned up for identification, and a sheet drawn over the pale limbs, the livid marks left by the rope hidden from view.
Mrs. Wycoff took several deep breaths, holding her friend’s hand before nodding for the sheet to be pulled back. After the briefest look she fell over backward in a full faint, pulling her friend down with her and hitting the floor before Oz or the lab assistant could catch her.
“Oh shit,” Oz said and the elderly friend gave him an affronted look. She accepted his arm to get to her feet. “Poor Janice,” she said. “Poor, poor Janice.”
It took waving a bottle of smelling salts under her nose to get Janice Wycoff to come to. She moaned as she sat up and tears ran down her face. Stephanie felt nauseated and had to fight the urge to run from the building.
Instead, she and Oz drove Mrs. Wycoff and her friend back to their pristine neighborhood and the friend took over, leading all of them into the living room, instructing them to place Janice on an upholstered sofa and disappearing into the kitchen only to return in a few minutes with a slug of whiskey.
Stephanie saw Oz looking longingly at the glass, but the woman had brought only one and she held it to Janice Wycoff’s lips as if she were a baby who needed to be suckled.
“Was your daughter depressed?” Stephanie asked after the woman had dutifully swallowed and grimaced on the harsh burn of liquor.
“She’s—she was—a teenager,” Janice Wycoff said in a dull voice. “They’re all depressed. Hormones.”
“Did it seem worse lately?”
“No. I don’t know. She didn’t tell me everything.” Tears welled up in her eyes and she didn’t blink them back. They slipped onto her cheeks and trailed down the powdered face, disappearing around her jaw and down her neck.
“Did she have any enemies?” Oz said.
More tears. Janice covered her eyes for a moment, her shoulders shaking. “She was different,” she said after a moment. “She was a smart girl, creative—not a joiner. She didn’t like school.”
“Was she religious?” Stephanie handed Mrs. Wycoff some tissues from the box on the coffee table.
Janice mopped at her face and shook her head. “Not as a Catholic, if that’s what you mean. She stopped going to church—outside of school, I mean—more than a year ago. She said it was hypocritical and frankly I couldn’t argue with that.”
She shot them a red-eyed but defiant look, as if expecting them to find this objectionable.
“Perhaps I should have forced her,” she said. “I’m sure her father would have argued for that, but I’m a single parent. I did the best I could.”
“Of course you did,” her friend said stoutly.
“Besides, she’d found another religion,” Janice Wycoff added.
“What was that?”
“Wicca. She was a self-proclaimed Wiccan.”
Chapter Four
The news of Morgan’s death spread to every member of the St. Ursula’s community before Lauren made it back to her house. She could feel the eyes of dozens of students, not to mention the other teachers and staff who had gathered around the main building.
“We’ll need to talk to you later,” the female cop had said, handing her a card just as if she were some insurance broker and not a homicide detective.
Back in the privacy of her room, Lauren locked her door, tossed the card on the
