“Wait.” Kaine lifted her head. She pointed. “There. Matthew Thorpe. I remember that name now—from the family Bible my grandpa had. It was Ivy’s father.”
“Ah ha!” Grant grinned. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“Matthew Thorpe resides with Joe Coldham and wife, Ivy, ages thirty-five and thirty-one. Daughters, ages ten, five, and two.” Kaine finished deciphering the script.
“The census was taken nine years after the dead girl was found at Foster Hill House,” Grant added.
“I know my great-great-grandmother was married in—” Kaine pulled the library book back onto her lap and skimmed over Ivy’s picture to a brief description of her—“1906.”
Grant didn’t answer, and Kaine lifted her head to study him. His brows were furrowed as he stared at the tablet.
“What is it?” Kaine couldn’t help the feeling of familiar unease that resurfaced inside her.
Grant’s mouth contorted in contemplation. “The census was taken in 1915. Ivy married Joe Coldham in 1906. That’s nine years later.”
“So?”
“So their eldest daughter? She’s ten years old, not nine, or even younger. Which means Ivy’s daughter was born before Ivy married.”
“But . . .” Kaine leaned back with her shoulders slouched. Kaine snatched the tablet from Grant’s hand. “She can’t . . . she can’t have . . .” The pit in her stomach grew and erased the warm peace of just moments before.
“If Gabriella and Maggie were both held in Foster Hill House, and Ivy was attacked and almost killed there, what if the killer did to Ivy whatever it was he did to Gabriella and Maggie?”
Kaine removed Ivy’s locket from where it hung around her neck beneath her T-shirt. She unlatched it to reveal the lock of hair. “This. It’s like baby hair. What if . . . ?” She let her sentence hang. She couldn’t speak it, couldn’t voice the horrible abuse she was terrified had been visited on Ivy.
“You’re thinking Ivy was raped?” When Grant said the words, it made Kaine snap the locket shut. She’d seen it so many times before. The abused, the victims of sexual violence, pregnant, the aftereffects of an abortion, or raising a child that resembled their abusers. It was horrific. It was worth never speaking of again. Of wiping from the pages of history. Kaine recalled the Bible whose family tree ended with Ivy’s name.
She cleared her throat and fought back tears. “What if Ivy’s daughter was the result of whatever she endured at Foster Hill House? What if it was the same horror Maggie never wished to talk about and Ivy took to the grave?”
Grant’s scowled. “Wait. Are you talking about sex trafficking?”
Kaine laid her palm over the photograph of Ivy in the library book. “People think the concept of the sex trade is modern day.” She closed the book on Ivy’s face. “But it’s been around since man decided that the value of women was the same as their livestock.”
“It would explain a lot about the comings and goings at Foster Hill House through the years.” Grant nodded. “Even the women Myrtle Foster claimed to have seen.”
Kaine didn’t want to contemplate it further, but all the facts were pointing toward the horrors she’d worked with her entire career.
“But why Foster Hill House? In small-town Oakwood? It’s not like this is Chicago where you’d find a hub or a network.”
Grant’s question was valid, but to Kaine it made sense. “Canada.” She pointed to the iPad. “Pull up a map.”
Grant took a few seconds, but soon the tablet had loaded a map of Wisconsin, Illinois, the Great Lakes to the east, and Lake Superior and Canada to the north. Kaine studied it for a long moment, then pointed.
“See? Traffickers have routes, sort of like the Underground Railroad did. If women were abducted in Canada, they would need to bring them south, toward Chicago, or to logging and mining camps along the way. They were known to transport women from Canada and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in ships on the Great Lakes. More likely than not, Chicago was the hub where women could be transported via rail out west.”
“How do you know all this?” Grant interrupted.
Kaine grimaced. “You learn how this stuff works after you’re immersed in helping to save these women. It wasn’t much different in Victorian times or the early 1900s. Mail-order brides?”
“Really?”
Kaine nodded and continued. “Some mail-order bride advertisements weren’t really that. There was a sex-trafficking ring in Chicago way back when, and they’d advertise for brides to transport them out west. But instead of finding husbands, they were sold to brothels.”
“Man, that’s sick.” Disgusted, Grant shook his head. “So you think Foster Hill House was a stop-off point between Canada and Chicago?”
Kaine drew in a deep breath as she reached up to unclasp Ivy’s locket from her neck. “I think Foster Hill House was the perfect hiding place. It was obscure, out of the way, off the map. An abandoned house no one cared about. A midway point.” She set the locket on the floor by the books. The very idea of it hanging around her neck made her skin burn with the memories it held.
Silence enveloped them until Grant cleared his throat. “But Ivy wasn’t sold. She survived.”
“So did Maggie,” Kaine nodded.
“Then why did they stay in Oakwood? After all the horror, why not flee from the memories?”
Kaine met Grant’s eyes. “I need to find out.”
“We need to find out,” Grant stated.
Kaine nodded her agreement. Abuse had followed her family for generations. Abuse had scarred her, affected her marriage, and the side effects of abuse had taken Danny’s life. Now it reared its ugly existence again, only from the pages of her own history. It had followed Kaine, since 1906.
“It’s time we lay Gabriella to rest forever,” Kaine murmured. “It’s what Ivy tried to do before she fell victim too.”
Grant reached for Kaine and tugged her once more into the comforting circle of his embrace. He rested his chin on the top of her head. “Crazy, but it seems that over a hundred years later, someone still doesn’t want us to exhume the truth.”
“But we will,” Kaine whispered. “For Ivy, for Gabriella, for Maggie . . . For me.”
Chapter 38
Jvy
Something crawled over her hand, and Ivy snatched it back. A spider probably, or a cockroach perhaps. God only knew what dwelt in this claustrophobic pocket behind the wall. Darkness enveloped her, and she had only enough room to sit with her knees curled to her chest. A tiny strip of light poked through the seam where the panel met the wall. Ivy had tried to move the panel, but it had to be latched on the outside somehow. She wasn’t the first to try. She could feel the indentations where other fingernails had scraped the wall.