Chapter 9 - Gone
The trouble started again when Emma was twelve.
It had been three years since the custody trial. Three years of peace. Three years of surgeries, school, beach days, birthday parties, normal kid stuff. The scars were still there, of course — faint silver lines across her cheeks, barely noticeable if you didn’t know to look for them, easy enough to cover with a little concealer when she wanted to. Emma didn’t bother most days. “They’re my battle stripes,” she’d say, flipping her hair back. “Superheroes have scars.”
We thought it was over. We thought we’d won.
We were wrong.
It started with small things. A dead bird on our front porch, its neck broken, left there like a gift. A rock through the kitchen window in the middle of the night. A series of hang-up calls, always at 3:13 AM — the exact time Daniel had kidnapped Emma.
The police wrote it off as kids being kids. Small-town pranks. But I knew. I’d lived with a Pierce long enough to recognize their signature.
Then came the letters.
Handwritten, no return address, postmarked from the town where Daniel was incarcerated. The first one was short:
I see her on the beach every day. She looks just like you. Just like my mother. Just like what I lost. You think you won, Claire? You think a piece of paper from a judge can stop a father from loving his daughter? I’m coming for what’s mine. Soon.
The second one was worse. It had a photo tucked inside — a recent photo of Emma at the beach, taken from the dunes, her back to the camera, building a sandcastle.
She’s getting so big. Almost a teenager. Soon she’ll understand. Soon she’ll know you kept her from her own father. Soon she’ll come looking for me. And when she does… I’ll be waiting.
Jake investigated immediately. He traced the letters — they were sent from the prison, but through a loophole: inmates could give mail to visitors, who’d then mail it from outside, avoiding the prison’s mail censors. The photo? Taken by a man named Leo Carter — no relation to Elaine — a recently released convict who’d shared a cell block with Daniel for two years. Daniel had paid Leo ten thousand dollars from a secret trust fund Richard had set up for him years ago — money even Jake hadn’t found — to follow us, take photos, send the letters, “keep them scared.”
Leo was arrested breaking into our garage one night, carrying a can of gasoline and a lighter. He confessed everything within an hour of being in custody. Daniel had ordered him to burn the house down with us inside.
But Leo was just the messenger. Daniel was still pulling the strings from his cell.
And he had help on the inside.
A guard at the prison — a man in his twenties who’d been a Pierce family friend growing up, whose father had worked for Richard’s construction company — had been smuggling Daniel a cell phone for months. A burner. Untraceable. Daniel had been using it to text Leo, to coordinate the harassment, to plan the fire.
The prison fired the guard, pressed criminal charges, put Daniel in solitary confinement — twenty-three hours a day in a six-by-eight cell, no visitors, no phone calls, no mail, no contact with anyone but the guards. They told us it would stop him. They told us he was neutralized.
They were wrong.
Daniel had had three years to make friends in prison. Three years to build alliances with the Aryan Brotherhood, with the Mexican Mafia, with every gang that ran the place. He had money — still, somehow, hidden accounts Richard had set up offshore — and money buys loyalty behind bars. Even in solitary, he could get messages out. Through guards he hadn’t corrupted yet, through other inmates being released, through lawyers.
The threats kept coming. More subtle now. A gang sign spray-painted on our fence. A strange car parked at the end of our driveway for hours at a time. Emma’s locker at school broken into, her books torn up, a note left inside: DADDY’S WATCHING.
We moved again. This time to a small town outside Burlington, Vermont — as far from the ocean, as far from Maine, as far from everything we’d ever known as we could get. New names weren’t necessary — the witness protection program wouldn’t take us, since Daniel was already in prison — but we bought the house under an LLC, used Jake’s name on all the utility bills, installed a security system so high-tech it could tell the difference between a squirrel and a man with a gun.
Emma started eighth grade at a new school. Made new friends. Joined the soccer team. Started painting — she was good, really good, selling her work at local art fairs to raise money for other burn survivors. For a few months, the threats stopped. We breathed again.
Then, on a Tuesday in October, Emma didn’t come home from school.
She was supposed to be at soccer practice until 5:30. At 5:45, the coach called. She’d never shown up. Her backpack was found by the bike rack, her phone still inside, her soccer cleats still in her locker.
The security footage from the school showed everything.
At 3:17 PM — that time again — a white van with no license plates pulled up to the curb by the bike rack. A man in a hoodie and a baseball cap got out, walked up to Emma as she was unlocking her bike, said something to her. She hesitated. Then — to our horror — she got in the van with him. Voluntarily. No struggle. No screaming. Just climbed into the passenger seat and closed the door.
The van pulled away. It was never seen on camera again.
The police were called. AMBER Alerts were issued. Jake was on the phone with every contact he had in New England within ten minutes. Elaine paced the kitchen, wringing her hands, while I sat on the couch staring at the security still the police had emailed over — Emma’s face, calm, almost resigned, as she climbed into that van.
Why didn’t she run? Why didn’t she scream? Why did she go with him?
We got the answer at 9:02 PM. A text from Emma’s phone — the one they’d left in her backpack, which meant they’d used a different phone to send it. A photo, attached.
Emma, sitting in a dark room, a concrete wall behind her. She looked unhurt. Calm. Next to her, a man with a shaved head and swastika tattoos on his neck. He was holding a gun to her temple.
The text read:
You should’ve let me see my daughter, Claire. Now you’re gonna pay. One million dollars in unmarked bills, dropped at the old lumber yard in Burlington at noon tomorrow. If you call the cops, she dies. If the money’s marked, she dies. If you’re even one minute late… well. You know what Pierces do to people who cross them.
A kidnapping. For ransom.
Daniel had ordered it from solitary. Somehow. Some way. He’d hired the Aryan Brotherhood to grab my daughter off the street in broad daylight. All because a judge had told him he couldn’t send her a Christmas card.
Jake wanted to pay. “A million’s nothing from the trust,” he said, pacing the living room. “We drop the money, we get her back, then we hunt these sons of bitches down. No cops. Cops get people killed in these situations.”
The FBI — who’d been called in the second the kidnapping was reported — wanted to do a sting. Fake money, SWAT teams hidden in the lumber yard, take the kidnappers down when they showed up. “We do this by the book,” the agent in charge said. “Any other way and she gets hurt.”
I was torn. Both options were terrible. Both could get Emma killed.
Then, at 11:47 PM — Christmas Eve’s time, Richard’s favorite — my phone rang. Unknown number.
I answered.
It was Emma.
“Mom,” she said, her voice steady, no fear in it at all. “Listen to me. Don’t pay them. Don’t do what they say. I’m okay. I know where I am. I’m in the old mill building on River Street — the one that burned down in ‘08. Third floor. The guy who took me — his name is Jax. He’s got a partner, Rico. They’re both high on meth right now, passed out in the next room. I tied their gun to the radiator with a shoelace while they were asleep. The door’s locked from the outside, but I can pick it with a bobby pin — you taught me that, remember? I’m gonna wait ‘til it’s light, then I’m gonna climb out the fire escape and walk to the diner on Main Street. You meet me there. Alone. No cops. No Jake. Just you. If you bring anyone, they’ll see and they’ll follow me and they’ll kill me. Do you understand? Alone.”
“Emma —” I sobbed into the phone. “Baby, let me send the police — let them come get you — it’s too dangerous —”
“Mom.” Her voice was firm. Authoritative. The voice of a girl who’d survived acid, murder, kidnapping, and a lifetime of Pierce men trying to break her. *“I’ve got this. I’ve been planning it since I got in the van. I let them take me, Mom. I knew if I fought, they’d hurt me worse. I knew if I played along, they’d get careless. And they did. Now I’m getting myself out. You just be at the diner at 7 AM. Alone. Okay?”
The line went dead.
I looked up at Jake, at the FBI agents, at Elaine. Everyone was staring at me.
“She’s in the old River Street mill,” I said, standing up, grabbing my coat and the baseball bat from under the counter. “Third floor. She says the kidnappers are passed out. She’s getting herself out. She wants me to meet her at the Main Street Diner at 7 AM. Alone.”
“Like hell you’re going alone,” Jake said, reaching for his own coat.
“She said alone.” My voice was steel. “And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about my daughter in the last four years — when she says she’s got something handled… she’s got it handled. But I’m not gonna be completely stupid. You guys can follow me. Far enough back that they don’t see you. Close enough that if something goes wrong, you’re there. But if she walks out of that diner and sees you? She’ll never forgive me. And I’ve already broken enough promises to that girl.”
No one argued.
At 6:45 AM, I pulled into the diner’s parking lot. It was empty except for a few trucks. I sat in the driver’s seat, the bat on the seat next to me, watching the door, watching the street, my heart hammering so hard I could hear it in my ears.
At 6:58, the diner door opened.
Emma walked out.
Her hair was messy. Her jeans were torn at the knee. There was a bruise on her left cheekbone, next to the scar. But she was walking upright. Her head was held high. In her hand, she held a large kitchen knife she’d apparently stolen from the mill’s break room.
She saw my car and broke into a run.
I jumped out and caught her as she slammed into me, nearly knocking me over, the knife clattering onto the pavement. She squeezed me so tight I could barely breathe.
“I told you I had it, Mom,” she mumbled into my shoulder.
I pulled back to look at her, touching the bruise on her face, checking her over for other injuries. “Are you okay? Did they hurt you? Did they —”
“Nah.” She grinned, that same gap-toothed, brave grin that had gotten her through a hundred doctor’s appointments. “I told ‘em my dad was Daniel Pierce, the guy who killed his own dad with Oxy. Said if they so much as touched a hair on my head, he’d have every gang member in the state hunt ‘em down and feed ‘em to the pigs. They believed me. Got so scared they got high and passed out. Suckers.”
I laughed through my tears. My daughter. The little girl who’d screamed in agony on Christmas morning had turned into a twelve-year-old who could outsmart two armed gang members and talk her way out of a hostage situation.
Behind us, unmarked cars were pulling up. FBI agents with guns drawn were racing toward the mill. Jake was running toward us, relief written all over his face.
May you like
Emma looked over my shoulder at them, then back at me.
“Can we get pancakes now?” she said. “I’m starving. Hostaging works up an appetite.”
