It wasn’t much of a challenge playing the Woman in White. If not for the current situation in Sleepy Hollow, she would actually have had fun. She wasn’t one of the terrifying characters, so she wasn’t expected to elicit terror. She was merely creepy.
But half the scare tactics at such a venue came from the art of surprise. All she did was walk—but when she appeared on the path unexpectedly, people screamed. She never broke character, never cracked a smile.
Yes, it could have been fun.
Except that she spent most of her time waiting to see if the ghost of Major Andre would appear again.
Andre made no more appearances.
When they were called in for the night and she went to scrub her face, she paused. Her makeup was really good. She looked both ethereal and very real.
“Hey, are we going to go out with the others?” Grace asked her.
Mo was tired; she should go home. But she didn’t think she’d sleep, anyway. “Sure.”
She and Grace headed out, followed by Ron, the makeup man, her old friend Phil and two young women who played historical characters, Greta Sanders and Mindy Cheswick. Phil extolled the blueberry pancakes at the diner, and Mo decided she was actually hungry. They ordered, and she was in the middle of learning how Mindy and Greta were costume designers in from the city for the season—they had begged for jobs as actors for the event after they’d been hired to design the costumes—when she heard the little bell at the door. When she turned casually to look, she was startled to see Aidan Mahoney entering the café.
Initially she thought he’d come in for coffee and food after work, just as she and her group had done— She couldn’t imagine why he’d be looking for her at 2:00 a.m.
But he walked straight to her table.
Aidan reached them and excused himself to the others. “Sorry to bother you. Mo, we need you. Now. There’s a missing child.”
She stared at him for a few seconds, stunned—and slightly ill. She’d been hungry. She wasn’t hungry anymore.
Child.
The word seemed to echo in her ears.
Finding a missing child. It was something she and Rollo often did. Families visited the local museums and parks, and parents lost track of their kids. Little kids could move like bats out of hell. They could easily go missing in the myriad historic venues in the area.
She was always optimistic; she’d been called out at least ten times in the past few years.
In all of those cases they’d found the missing children, alive and mostly well. One ten-year-old had broken his arm playing in a tree. One little girl had fallen down into a hollow in the woods and sprained an ankle.
They’d been dirty, frightened and crying—but alive.
But there hadn’t been a known murderer in the area at the time—beheading his victims.
“A child?” she said weakly.
“Please,” Aidan said quietly.
The others at her table were silent—just watching. Listening.
“Of course. Excuse me,” she told them. As she rose, she told Aidan, “I’ll need Rollo.”
“I’ll take you to get him right now.”
“I have several articles of clothing that belonged to the boy,” Aidan said. “I got them at his house.”
“Good. Rollo will need a scent,” Mo said.
As they left the restaurant, Mo was aware that Ron and the others were plying Grace with questions and Grace was explaining that Mo had a search-and-rescue dog named Rollo.
“A kid. Damn, that sucks,” she heard Ron say.
Outside, she found Van Camp and Voorhaven standing by their car; two patrol cars were parked next to them, the officers awaiting their next order.
“Hey, Mo,” Van Camp called to her. He walked over and pressed something into her hands. “We went to the Appleby house to see if the boy was there—he wasn’t. Here,” he said, and she realized he’d brought her the boy’s clothing in a plastic bag. She could see the shirt he must have worn for his Little League games and a small polo shirt with a school logo on it. “The boy’s name is John Jacob Appleby. Goes by J.J. He’s eight years old,” Van Camp said.
“You found his mother yesterday morning,” Aidan told her.
“Oh, no,” Mo murmured. Her heart sank. “So...you learned the identity of Jane Doe?” she asked in a whisper.
Aidan nodded. “Wendy Appleby. Her son, J.J., is just...gone. You can help, right?”
“Rollo can help,” she said. “Except that we need somewhere to start.”
“His house? I don’t really know what else to suggest. They would’ve been there recently. And they might have been kidnapped from there.” He paused. “Wendy Appleby and her son were supposed to be going on a trip to New York. That’s why they weren’t missed.”
“I guess the house makes sense. But...”
Her voice trailed off. The mother had been dead for almost forty-eight hours. That didn’t bode well for the child.